Fair Lady

Women's Work

by Ann Braybrooks and photographs by Matt Petricone, October 25, 2007

In 2003, when Cecilia Dinio-Durkin was working as a travel writer in Botswana, she accompanied a nonprofit worker on a crafts-buying trip to a San settlement in the Kalahari Desert. The San are southern Africa’s oldest inhabitants, and, until recently, had practiced hunting and gathering for tens of thousands of years. While many San still live in the desert, few subsist entirely on traditional methods of acquiring food.

For the trip into the desert, Dinio-Durkin and her guide brought everything they would need, which included a tent and their own food, water, and firewood. During the bumpy, eight-hour drive across sand, during which Dinio-Durkin says her “whole insides were completely shaken,” she learned that they would be gone for three days. She remembers exclaiming, “Three days? We’re going to be out here for three days?”

Although Dinio-Durkin had moved to Botswana with her two young children and husband, Peter Durkin, a civil engineer and former Peace Corps volunteer, she considered herself to be a city girl, a New York City girl in particular. She had agreed to go along with her husband, whom she calls the outdoorsy one, after he had seen a posting for a game-reserve manager on findajobinafrica.com. Now she found herself traveling alone with a woman she had just met, across an endless flat landscape interrupted only by an occasional hut.

The next morning, Dinio-Durkin had what she calls a life-changing experience. It led to her working for the same nonprofit as her guide, the Kuru Family of Organizations, and ultimately to opening a crafts shop called Women’s Work in Cold Spring.

“We started boiling water in this tin pot for coffee,” she says, “and I look up, and women are coming from all directions. I don’t know how many hundreds of women surrounded us.” During the course of a year, Dinio-Durkin says, the nonprofit worker would rotate visits to 16 settlements, where she bought crafts to sell in the organization’s shop in Ghanzi, a town with about 30,000 residents.

“I was stunned,” says Dinio-Durkin. “So I sat there, and I had my camera, and I was writing notes, and they would just come, and surround us, and pull out their crafts.” She says that the women had wrapped themselves in blankets and other garments, and from within the folds of their clothing, they pulled out jewelry, baskets, and other items. Many of the women were accompanied by young children.

“I couldn’t have been further away from the life that I knew, and I’m looking out at these women, and I’m crying,” she says. “And I didn’t even know I was crying until I realized that this little kid among the women looked exactly like my nephew. And that’s when it just overwhelmed me, [the knowledge] that we’re all the same. They only wanted what I wanted when I was in Cold Spring.”

In the mid ’90s, after their daughter was born, Dinio-Durkin and her husband left Manhattan and moved to Garrison, then Cold Spring. At first, she commuted to her job as a magazine editor, a job she loved, but the 11-hour days left little time for family. She quit and began working as a freelance writer, which also proved to be frustrating due to the short time frames and her inability to predict when the next assignment would arrive (typical of freelance work).

“To me, Cold Spring was this remote, desolate place, because I lived so far away from New York City and everything I knew,” says Dinio-Durkin. “I gave up my career so that my children could have a safe haven.” She adds, “These women [the San] could go into the cities and get jobs and make money [primarily as domestics], but they’d rather be home with their children. And if I could do something to help them stay home and raise their children and live with their husbands and have a life that they’ve always known, if all it took was for me to buy one of their bracelets so they could feed their family for a month, that’s what I needed to do.”