In Sukawati, most of the villagers are wood carvers, silversmiths and clothing sellers.
Because our family's economic condition was so limited, I worked after school so I could pay the school fees of my siblings, and also help my parents. My parents really loved and took care of their children well. My father was a civil servant while my mother was a food seller.
We hope you will love them." - Ying and Joy Our designs are inspired by love, nature, positive thoughts, happiness, our experiences, love, and passion. Joy performs quality control, exports, and contacts the leader of each women's group. Ying comes up with designs and marketing strategies. We used our contacts from our old company and started to develop our own pieces. Our project was the best way to help them. Most of them were over 40, so it was hard to find other garment factories to work in. Some of them went back to longan farming. After the company closed, a group of women with different skills in our old factory had to return to their homes located in different parts of Chiang Mai. Our new chapter began with an unexpected change, but we turned crisis into opportunity in order to build our new home where our friends and family could live together. We studied and worked here and were friends since working together at a clothing company. We create woven, knitted, hand-embroidered, and dyed garments. "Hello! We are Ying and Joy, co-founders of a small clothing workshop in Chiang Mai. (About 85% of people with MS are initially diagnosed with RRMS.) Though symptoms can come and go, for the most part, Bruna can live and function as most people without MS would. There’s a wide diversity in what MS looks like and what it means for a person’s abilities, and the spectrum is exemplified in Bruna and Jaime’s experiences.īruna has relapsing remitting MS (RRMS), which is the most common type of MS. Jaime says people will ask how they were able to conceive a child, assuming that his using a wheelchair meant that they were unable to have sex-one of the many erroneous assumptions about people with disabilities. “But I think it’s difficult to be a mom and dad for everybody.” “People don’t believe that we can be a mom and dad with chronic disease and disability,” she says. “But when we decided to have a kid, we were very passionate that we were capable of educating our child.”
“When I was diagnosed, we believed-and science believed-that people with MS couldn’t have children, it was not appropriate to have children with MS,” says Bruna. Six months after their first email exchange, they finally met in person. Soon, they were emailing every single day, sharing little details of their lives. Jaime was working on his master’s degree at the time and wanted to ask her questions about being in academia with a chronic disease. After he was diagnosed, Jaime began researching MS and came across posts Bruna had written about doing her doctoral studies while living with MS. Jaime and Bruna actually met through Bruna’s blog. “That was one of the reasons I started my blog,” says Bruna, “because I didn’t want anyone else to go through this situation.” He’d been having trouble walking and running and experiencing weakness for a few years, so he was glad to finally have an explanation for what was happening with his body.įor both Bruna and Jaime, their diagnosis was their first contact with MS. Jaime found out he had MS in 2012 at age 28, but instead of a shock, he says his diagnosis came as a relief.