[Music] Welcome to the Loved Called Gifted podcast. This is your place to come for musings about spirituality, identity and purpose. I'm your host, Catherine Cowell.

C: So for this episode of the podcast I am delighted to be joined by Maria Skoyles.
Hello Maria.

M: Hello, it's nice to be with you again.

C: So we met at New Wine and Maria was selling dresses and had a really interesting story about Dorcas dresses which is what your dresses are called and how that all came to be.
Before we kind of dive into that do you want to tell us whereabouts you're recording from?

M: Yeah I'm recording at the bottom of my garden in a little Oxfordshire village just west of Oxford.

C: Lovely and do you want to tell us a bit about what you were doing at New Wine?

M: Yes we had hired a hut and we were selling dresses that had been made around the world as a means of supporting our partners in different countries, who come from situations of financial hardship.

C: Yes so largely women I think.

M: Yes the majority of the people we serve are women. It's not 100% women, but it is predominantly women, and predominantly women that live in rural settings where setting up business can be quite tricky.

C: Yeah just to kind of set the scene for us, do you have a story maybe of one of your partners and kind of how she got into this and what difference it's made?

M: Well I think probably two stories would be quite nice to share because they're quite different stories.

One of our sewing hubs is part of a vocational school for students who have struggled in education. It's based in Uganda and they make dresses in a really rural setting to the extent where when I visited last year there was no proper road access for vehicles to get to the village from the local town. I had to spend 45 minutes on a motorbike travelling at 20 miles an hour on a mud track to get there. They have no electricity, only what they can generate through solar panels for their computers, and they access water from a borehole. So that gives you a kind of setting.
There are about 20 or 30 students who were on the tailoring course there. They also run courses in carpentry and building, in mechanics and computers and so I was supporting the mainly girls doing the tailoring course, and it's those girls and the staff that we support as part of the dress project, and they make the dresses for us as part of their school enterprise.
It's very much a group effort.

And then quite different we're in a city in India called Bangalore, and we have about half a dozen ladies that make dresses for us there.
One of the ladies doesn't live in a city, she lives quite far out of the city in a more rural setting, and part of that project was for us to provide each of the women with a sewing machine so that they could eventually bless someone else.
So one of those stories is about a lady called Sandhya. She lives with her husband there, a pastor and pastor's wife, and when she was younger she saved up money for a sewing machine but unfortunately - her father took the money she'd saved and used it to buy alcohol. And so when we went last year and gave her a sewing machine she really felt as though it had been the answer to a long-term prayer of hers to get a sewing machine.
We said to her what we're doing is we're blessing you with a sewing machine so that you can bless someone else when you've earned enough money from it and she has since then bought herself her own sewing machine, a rather posh industrial sewing machine I might add and she now has an apprentice who uses a sewing machine that we gave her, so she's thrilled that she's been able to bless somebody through her being blessed herself.
And part of our support for her was also to provide her with some funds for a pattern cutting course and she's - it's really exciting - she's passed on those skills that she's learning to her apprentice, so she's really making sure our money is well spent and is generating blessings beyond blessings which is really lovely.

C: Yeah so what is she doing now that she wasn't doing? is she in business how does all of that work?

M: She's now set herself up with a dressmaking business and she's employing this other lady. She wasn't working before and it is giving her a sense of empowerment and she's bringing in income for her family which is really encouraging I think.

C: Yeah yeah. So do you want to take us back to how did you get into this Maria?

M: How far would you like me to go back?

C: How far would you like to go back?

M: So when I was 14 or around sort of that mid teens sort of age I was part of a Christian church group and a youth group and we had a prayer and prophetic evening and on one of those evenings I was given this prophetic word about being "Dorcus" and it really had quite an impact on me. It encouraged me to use my sewing skills.

C: Do you want to tell people who don't know, who "Dorcus" is?

M: Yeah so the word "Dorcus" is a dressmaker in acts. She is one of the few women in the bible that is described as a disciple rather than just a follower of Jesus. She is described as being someone who was known for her acts of charity, and good works, and Peter thought it important enough to visit her when her female community were grieving her death. And he went to visit and God empowered Peter to pray over Dorcus and she was resurrected and brought back to life.

C: And then presumably went on to continue to make dresses.

M: It's really interesting she was definitely a dressmaker in the group but I'm not sure that all the women around her her deathbed were dressmakers, but it's nice to think that they might have been.

C: What I remember from that story is that they got examples hadn't they - presumably they weren't all dressmakers because she was making stuff for everybody.

M: Yeah.

C: So they'd all got things that she'd made for them that had really blessed them.

C: Yes that's the thing that I find really special is that Dorcus obviously served her community with her skills in such a way that she was a blessing to others - and to be named a disciple and to be named a dressmaker must mean that her dressmaking was part of her discipling role and identity.

C: Yes yeah. So you're 14 somebody believes that God wants you to know that God sees you as somebody like Dorcus.

M: Yes so I decide to do my GCSE textiles GCSE. I then decide to go and do a vocational qualification in textiles and I go into industry and I go into teaching, and part of my teaching I would teach so the ethics of fashion and encourage other people to go into ethical fashion environments, as a course leader.
And I honestly thought that I had kind of spent this prophetic word as it were.

And then in 2010 imagine me as an exhausted course leader who was quite wiped from teaching pleaded with God for a change, and I went to a church service one Sunday morning - there was this throne in the middle of the room and the chairs had been all laid out in a circle to face this throne, and the service was all based around putting something at the foot of the throne for God. So I put my college ID at the foot of the throne and I said to God "you can have this because I'm not sure I want it anymore."

C: Excellent.

M: The following day an email came out to members of staff asking if they wanted to take voluntary redundancy, and so I took voluntary redundancy. The short of it is by the end of that year I had taken voluntary redundancy and that was one of the things that Richard I'd been praying about. Even though my husband had been made redundant not many months before that, and we had two teenage kids, so this is a big jump for us as a family financially. Huge yeah.

And during that that sort of autumn term three people came up to me and said "oh you remind me of Dorcas" or "do you know who Dorcas is in Acts has anyone ever spoken to you about Dorcas" and and I just thought okay I need to be hearing this, you know I'm not just - if someone's not just mentioned it once or twice - this is three times it's being repeated to me.

So in the January after I'd finished teaching, I started digging back into what it actually meant. And I started going to farmers markets and having a table and offering alterations and dressmaking for people.
And one of my things I would do is when I did sewing I would pray for people, and it got to the point where I realised I was selecting who I was praying for rather than offering to pray for everybody.
So I ended up having this docket printed out and on it says "When I sew I pray, what can I pray for" with a reference to mark 11 verse 22 to 25.
"Have faith in God whatever you ask in prayer believe that you have received it and it will be yours whenever you stand praying forgive if you have anything against anyone so that your father also who is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses"
And that's what I put on the bottom that was on the docket and I saw a lot of people's prayers being answered.
- I saw women who'd had repeated miscarriages pray for babies and then a year later contact me and say they'd love me to meet their new son.
- I prayed for people independently who were seeking to find partners and they ended up one new year's eve standing on my doorstep together, completely separate prayers for people

And it was a really rich time of recognising that God wants us to have our faith built through the prayers that we pray for people and he wants to build other people's faith through the prayers we pray for them and they participate in as well.

And I felt as though I wasn't very well equipped to do what I was doing so I ended up doing a theology course, and it was out of one of those assignments that the dress was designed and the charity was formed.

C: So are you still doing your theology have you finished that?

M: That theology course was part-time for three years and it was from 2012 to 2015/16 it was through an organisation called KST the module was on social transformation, so I looked at two different sewing groups one in Derby and one in East Africa.
Both groups were wanting to serve the poor and support the poor financially into financial independence through dressmaking. The group in East Africa were supporting local women 'mommas' as they would call them, and the group in Derby was serving refugees. And the common link was they were both making shopping bags and selling them for a shockingly cheap amount of money which wouldn't have got anyone out of any kind of form of financial hardship.

So the group in East Africa said what we really want is we want to be able to make some addresses that we can sell to tourists, and that's where it all kind of started. The assignment brief was to write a list of actions that we would do to serve this social situation and to help change it, and I thought well it's all very well and good writing an action plan why don't I just do it?

C: Excellent, excellent.

M: So I decided to do it and use all the skills that I'd had from teaching and from working with fair trade producers in South America while I was teaching and I wrote myself a design brief to design address that could be made in a remote part of the world where there was no access to electricity, and where you couldn't access anything other than local fabric and thread.

C: So you haven't got to supply yourself with buttons and zips and poppers and all of those things?

M: No because that's a real challenge when you live somewhere where you can't get hold of them. And the practical aspects of being able to service complicated machinery so it was also really important that you could make the dress on a hand-operated straight stitch sewing machine.

C: So you designed a dress, do you want to tell us a bit about it?

M: I think one of the things I think is really important to know is the dress was designed for the makers. Quite often we buy products and we criticise them because they're not suitable for us as customers. You know it's to this or it's not this or it hasn't got this and the focus for this dress was not about meeting the needs of a customer it was about meeting the needs of the producers that are in really quite often difficult circumstances.
So the dress has no zips buttons or commercial fastenings, it's size adjustable to a size 6 to 26 and it wraps pleats and folds and ties to form a quite elegant dress that you can sort of layer with other garments.
So I often wear mine over the top of a t-shirt or a nice blouse.

C: Excellent, so how many different areas are these dresses being made in?

M: We have sewing hubs in Uganda, Nigeria, Burundi, Tanzania, Kenya, India and Oxfordshire and Shropshire.

C: That's quite a range, that's amazing. And they're all different, they're all very different and I think the key thing about them is that there's two parts to a sewing hub. There's the building, the enterprise and the enterprise growth, but there's also the building community and community growth and sort of the relational element of it as well.
So it's not just about sewing and making dresses and making money, it's about building relationships and introducing people to who Jesus is and the wonder of being in a friendship with him.

C: Yeah, yes and with one another. So I'm wondering whether some of those women have been quite isolated before they joined these hubs?

M: They most definitely have and they really value online prayer and worship sessions and having the opportunity to chat with people from across the globe basically.
I find it quite emotional when we do gather, it's a really messy unsophisticated gathering and you really have to have the grace to understand that your conversation is going to get translated into a number of languages before you hear a response back. But you can see the richness and the diversity and yet our commonality as women or with a desire to love one another, pray for one another, be sisters together in our varying environments and circumstances.

C: Yeah, so what have been the joys for you in this and I think you've probably mentioned some of them already?

M: It's extremely life-giving. I get huge amounts of joy seeing the sowing hubs thrive, seeing them grow.
I really enjoy the laughter we have online and the silly things that we giggle about that are very common to us, whether we're in England, whether we're in Africa, whether we're in India, whether we live in a city or in a rural environment, we have so much in common, which is extremely humbling.

C: Yeah, yeah.

M: Even the rain makes us laugh.
Because often enough the Zoom calls are disturbed by the rain and we laugh when it's raining at the same time in two completely different places. But a lot of us have tin roofs. My studio has a tin roof so I get the same noise on my tin roof as the ladies get when they're meeting in Bangalore in their church building, and when the ladies in Africa meet in their buildings in Uganda or in Kenya. We all have a tin roof in common which is quite funny.

C: So you can all hear the rain, you know what the weather's like.
So obviously kind of textiles and fabric has been part of your life for a long time and evidently has been something that you found enough in that to keep you there and I'm wondering what your first experience of sewing and dressmaking was, if you remember that.

M: I don't know what my first experience was but I do remember making clothes for my doll while my mum would sew at her sewing machine, and I also remember sewing with my grandma.
My grandma died when I was four or five, so it's in my DNA. I think's a good phrase.

C: So it's been part of your heritage.

M: Yeah, definitely. Sewing is who I am.

C: Can you remember an early thing that you made that you're particularly chuffed with?

M: In my wardrobe, still in my wardrobe, is this burgundy corduroy waistcoat that I made as part of my GCSE textiles coursework, and it's got leaves embroidered on it with a satin stitch with black lining on it and quite a lot of years later, bearing in mind I was 15 or 16 then, it still remains in my wardrobe. I don't wear it very often but to think I would still wear that now as an item of clothing that I consider demonstrates my skill is something I think.

C: Yes. And what are the elements of dressmaking that you particularly enjoy?

M: It depends what kind of mood I'm in.

C: Okay.

M: Yeah, so sometimes I find unpicking something really rhythmic, and this sense of taking something back to its core elements before rebuilding it into something that is actually purposeful and useful or fitted. I think there's something really special about that.

I really like pressing things and people don't think that ironing is part of sewing and as a teacher the thing for me was students recognizing that the iron was probably the most important tool in comparison to the sewing machine. Because even if you didn't sew particularly well, if you pressed something well you could make it look beautiful but if you sewed something really well and pressed it badly it would look like a rag.
And so one of the skills that I enjoyed as a teacher was taking something that a student had made and helping them press it to make it something they were very proud of.

C: Ah, brilliant.
The other thing that you've mentioned is sort of the ethics of the fashion industry and I wonder what your kind of feelings, passion, thoughts are around that.

M: The fashion industry thrives on our desire to recreate ourselves and keep recreating ourselves because fashion is a way of presenting ourselves and we frequently do it in a way that doesn't honour those people that have contributed to the production of the things that we make.

Very often do it in such a way that doesn't honour creation and world resources and the planet which I think is quite sad.

C: Yeah so by contrast, I'm just thinking about the honouring the people who've made them. I remember hearing somebody say that even if you buy something from Primark somebody has still sewed it.

M: Yeah.

C: So the fact that you might only have paid a couple of quid for it doesn't alter the human effort that has gone into it and she was very much arguing for a deep respect for that.

M: Yes. It is important to respect even those people that we don't know who are part of the worlds that we live in. Those people that make things, that produce things in factories deserve the same amount of respect and honour, as those people that in our society have professions that are higher ranking and higher paying.

C: Yes yeah.
Most things that we hold in our hands are complicated aren't they? You know you pick up a pen there's ink and there's plastic and there's somebody who's transported it. Somebody probably has steered that on a container on a ship across the ocean. Somebody else has brought it to the shop. Somebody sold it to you.
There's a huge potential for gratitude and recognition and honour isn't there about just about everything that we hold and I think...

M: Everything yes.

C: Yes fashion is a particular part of that.

M: Yeah we are told not me to love our neighbour.

C: Yeah as you were talking I was thinking about when I came and bought a dress, as I was looking in your little mini temporary hut - boutique I was going to say.

M: Yeah it was I curtained it in such a way that I wanted it to look like a boutique.

C: It was beautifully done out, but there were the pictures of some of the women who have been making these things and you were able to say when we were looking at the dresses - well this was made by this woman and this was made by this woman.

M: Yes.

C: There's something very precious about that.

M: There is and I think that's why I find so much joy in what I do because dress making is a small part of it really. It's the relationships that we've created and the friendships that we've built that are so important and they give us all life.

I think there's this temptation to think that they are serving us because they are making things for us to sell but it's a mutual relationship and I gain as much from their presence as they gain from us.

I gain from their prayer and I gain from their stories and I gain from their deep rooted trust in God for their daily needs, and it keeps me humble, and it keeps me recognizing that God is with us.

I see a dependence on God with the women I work with.

I see them depending on him for their health, for their families, for their education and for their daily bread quite often and if it's not for their personal daily bread but for the daily bread of their neighbors and their friends.

C: Yeah. For you this has brought together quite a lot of different things hasn't it?
Kind of your experience in industry, your experience as a sewing teacher, your love of sewing from when you were young, your faith, it's sort of all come together beautifully out of taking an essay assignment seriously.

M: Yes it has, yes. And that essay assignment was just a small part of it because I could have left it just there as a dress and there was an encouragement from some of my peers on the course to make some and I was like well you know God I'll tell you what I'll do - I'll make 40 and if I sell them all I'll take it another step and it has been about just taking one faithful step at a time.

When I did the assignment I didn't know that I would be here 10 years, nearly 10 years later with sewing hubs across Africa and in India. If someone had told me that that was what was going to be happening I think I'd have crumbled under the potential weight of it.
But it was about making a dress and then it was about making 40 and then it was about seeing if I could find a local boutique that might sell them, and then it was seeing whether or not we could go and run this with a group in Nigeria.
And then it was a huge fall - and it was how do I pick myself up out of this? and that was when I thought I am not equipped I need to do some more study - so I went and did an MA with CMS and it is part of this whole process has been about how we use our failings and our what we perceive as failings to move forward, and not give up, but doing it in such a way that constantly listening to God.

C: Yeah

M: One of my recent things is realizing that you can knock really hard on a door and it'll open and then there's that tapping on the door waiting for God's timing. And I'm in a season at the moment where I am realizing that tapping on the door and waiting is far wiser than knocking hard on the door out of pure insistence that this is where I think we should be going.

C: So it's more like following the dance steps of the spirit isn't it then kind of?

M: Yes yeah and recognizing that the spirit understands or hovers from above and therefore sees all the different dance moves happening and all the different dancers and making sure that everything's in time.

I'm a bit impatient though sometimes.

C: Yes but it sounds it sounds like God has really used those moments of insistence as well.

M: Yes I guess he has. But I would say looking back that those moments of insistence would have been a dance site easier if I had just rested in God, and let him do, rather than trying to push and push and push.

C: Yeah.

M: Yeah we learn from these things though don't we?

C: Yes and it's not always easy to know is it at the point when something's happening whether this is the moment for sort of a bit of persistence or whether this is the moment to kind of relax into what it is that God is already doing and flowing with that. and you don't - you can see that looking back but in the middle of it I think it's much trickier.

M: Yeah I think there is a difference though between gentle persistence and downright stamping your feet like a naughty toddler.

One story that I think is a great example of this is, I think it was last year we were waiting for a batch of dresses to arrive from Uganda to go to an August summer festival and they arrived in customs in Coventry in early July and my address label had fallen off the package but all the customs documentation was with the parcel which included my address. And we paid all the taxes and everything the customs you know, that wasn't the reason, but the address label was not on the package and the postal firm refused to deliver the package, and they returned all the way to Uganda, back to the sewing hub.
And I discovered they sent it back at the end of August early September and I was asked would I pay for it to be returned and this is 160 pounds we're talking about it's not a cheap package.

C: Wow.

M: And sort of 20 dresses so that's what eight pounds of cost on each dress, and if I'd have had to pay it again that would have been 16 pounds - and it was just like that's...

At the end of September I had this sudden prompting, Holy Spirit prompting, to message a friend of mine who I knew had connections with the sewing hub in Uganda. And I WhatsApp messaged him and said you don't happen to know anybody that's traveling to Uganda do you because we've got this parcel that's got stuck that's been returned. It would have been about five to eight in the morning to which he promptly replied "no sorry I don't think I can help".

And so my phone is sat beside me while I'm doing morning prayer for the hour, and it is going absolutely bonkers - it's pinging there's a ping and a ping and a ping, and I put it on silent and then it's buzzing - and I'm tempted to look at it, but I don't because you know you know I'm supposed to be concentrating on praying and doing morning prayer.
And so I picked my phone up at nine o'clock at the end of morning prayer - and I'm not kidding you there must have been about 50 messages on WhatsApp. Basically the narrative was in short: "no I don't know anyone", "oh yes I might know someone" "I do know they're in Uganda at the moment I'll connect us into a group".
I'm connected into the group this guy is 45 minutes outside of Soroti waiting for a truck to come and pick his broken down car up and take him to the garage. The mechanic comes and picks him up. Yes he can go to the post office in Soroti. The guy from Tanu yes I can get to the post office and hired a motorbike to get himself to the post office, the guy from the Tanu manages to get to the post office to get his parcel to go to the guy that's at the mechanic shop to give the guy the parcel to bring it back to the UK and that all happens in an hour.

C: wow, it's amazing.

M: I could have really wrestled with that whole problem of this parcel having gone back and to just be prompted to send one person a message and then three weeks later the parcel arrives.
The longest part of this journey unsupervised from that moment was from this guy's house in the UK to my house via royal mail, and you just think you know that's God isn't it he doesn't want us to wrestle he wants us to give him our burdens and let him do, and I think sometimes we do forget that.

C: yeah yeah.
I'm very aware of the time, I know you need to leave.

M: I'm having too much fun

C: oh it's brilliant. So so thank you thank you very very much for sharing your story with us Maria that's been that's been brilliant, and if people want to know more about your project and about buying dresses then they can find all of that on dorcusdressproject.org

[music] Hope you enjoyed this episode of the Loved Called Gifted podcast.

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