"I don't know who will take over when we can no longer do this," says Jayanthi, 58. Her broad grin suggests she knows full well the answer to this question of succession. "The younger ones in our family have more opportunities than we did. They go to school and may want to do other things."

Jayanthi and Pugna are a small part of one of Sri Lanka's very large cottage industries. Sri Lanka and India produce 90% of the world's 250,000 metric tons of coir every year.

Sri Lanka's fishers depend on rope made from good quality coir because it is the only natural fibre that resists damage by salt water.

I watch these two craftspersons with amazement. Seeing them draw brown wiry fibres from pillow-sized bails tucked under their arms is like observing a magic show. How do they turn such short lengths of fibre into a long rope? They perform this optical illusion while slowly backing away from one hand-cranked wooden contraption towards another. As an operator turns the wooden wheel, two long nails spin clockwise, each turning the strand that is attached to it.  Observing the dower expressions on their faces you could be forgiven for thinking this is less a craft than a simple, mindless exercise. To the contrary, it looks easy only because the hundreds of adjustments they are making while spinning this thirty-foot rope - maintaining the right tension and speed gathering and feeding the strands into two rotating lines of rope that get longer with each backward - have been done so often the process is now a refined ritual with subtle hand movements that defy detection. 

And if the hand is quicker than the eye, Jayanthi and Pugna have proven in recent years to be quicker than the forces conspiring to bring their business to a close.

The country's backyard coir industry is losing ground to mechanized mills which rely on low-cost rural labour. New technology and training is expected to bolster the mechanized side of the industry even further in the coming years in a bid to make it more competitive worldwide. Jayanthi and Pugna bully
through the lean times by producing quality rope delivered on time to middlemen who have been buying her product for years. They produce 15,000 feet of rope each month. 

Then, during the 2004 Asian tsunami, a wall of water destroyed everything they owned, including the tools of their trade. "We lost our friends and our house, everything," remembers Jayanthi.

As she and her family set about putting their lives back together again, the SANASA credit union movement in Sri Lanka and the Canadian Co-operative Association, aided by the Canadian International Development Agency, set into motion a massive program to help women like Jayanthi get the support they needed. The program has delivered emergency aid, rebuilt houses and credit union buildings, installed water and sanitation structures and trained many  Sri Lankans, mostly women, in a wide spectrum of trades. The program reached beyond those directly affected by the tsunami.

A revolving loan fund was established and waves of small but strategically designed loans were issued to members of small groups of five women each, known as Uthamavi groups. Uthamavi means honourable woman, a reference to according greater status to lower cast women. Meeting monthly in their villages the members of these small cells of women received vocational and life skills training, gave each other support, and approved and guaranteed loan requests from each other whenever they thought the business ideas such loans were meant to finance would fly.  In the Matara region of southern Sri Lanka alone some 150 Uthamavi groups have been established, connecting over 750 women to needed credit and training. Thousands of loans of between $30 and $500 have been issued and now continue to revolve throughout the region.

"We heard there was a machine to make the bails of fibre," says Jayanthi. "Using bails that are already made would save us work so we arranged with the people who owned the machine to borrow bails of fibre and pay them back when we sold the rope."