How the Travels of a Mother Inspired a Business Idea

Once upon a time, not long ago, there was a woman. She had a family, four kids of her own, two girls and two boys. She wasn’t much different from any other woman you may see out there. She wasn’t taller or shorter than many others, nor was she bigger or smaller. What was so special about the woman in our story is that she had a mission. She was determined to make a difference in the world. She would let nothing stand in her way. And so she did.

She had worked in a birth centre, taking care of children and their mothers. She had also taken care of her own. Until one day she felt it, it was like a call. She set off to the other side of the world to share what she learnt about birth with women out there. She travelled for years across a land called Myanmar, teaching Traditional Birth Assistants safer birthing practices. It wasn’t always easy, to be far from home, in the midst of the unknown. But she was guided by purpose. She was filled with joy every time in front of her eyes a daughter became a mother. Witnessing that bond get sealed over and over again through different faces, different voices, different names but always with the same energy, like electricity. Women in the mountains, in the jungle and by the lake alike.

There one day, among the Intha people, the “children of the lake”, she came across something curious. It was flower, called Lotus. The locals told her a fascinating story about it: every night, the Lotus flower closes its petals and dips under the murky surface of the lake, only to remerge from the dark the following morning, untouched and pure. “Every day of the flower is like a birth”, she thought. 

She then learnt that the locals picked the flowers and used the stems to make a cloth, raw to look at but soft at touch. The women of the lake, quiet and wise, spun silky threads out of the stems, with gentle movements and a serene air. They believed the fabric retained the flower’s property of candour, resilience and purity and they deemed it worthy of kings and monks. “How curious and unusual! How charming!”, she said, “I will take some back to England to show my daughters”, and so she did. Little did she know that her tale about the women of the lake and that piece of cloth would be the beginning of a new journey, and that this time she would bring one of her daughters along.