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Photo by Bill Green Frederick textile artist Katrina Ulrich displays some of the handmade crafts made by women she has worked with during trips to India.

Blue Mango, a women's craft company based in India, was started by Ulrich's sister, Tamar DeJong. Ulrich joined the staff, doing everything from designing products to organizing paperwork, and traveling to southern India to work with employees directly.

Blue Mango employs local women who live in the villages and ride a bus each day to Blue Mango, located in the hills of Tamil Nadu, in Southern India. Priority is given to widows, victims of domestic abuse and women who are handicapped or infected with HIV or AIDS.

"No one else in that society will hire them," Ulrich said. "The social stigmas are so bad for that demographic."

Blue Mango also provides on-site day care, where children of the employees can stay throughout the day.

"In Blue Mango, there's no such thing as caste," she said.

The company employs 50 to 70 women at a time. Its oldest employees have moved to senior positions, such as supervisor of the program, quality control manager of stitching, quality control manager of beading and product designer.

"Men in the society, a lot of them don't want their wives working with women with AIDS," Ulrich said. "The village ways are slow to change, especially how men regard women. Women want to work, have a savings account."

She added that even though the caste system has been outlawed, people still use it.

In addition to employing and training women to create handmade products, Blue Mango gives its employees seminars on self-esteem, confidence and basic self-defense, because there is so much accepted abuse in the region.

Blue Mango also offers free health care.

Most workers are paid per item, except those in supervisor positions, who receive a daily wage.

"Their earning potential is really good, if they apply themselves," Ulrich said.

Most of the women speak Tamil, which DeJong speaks fluently. Ulrich speaks it "like a child, but we understand you," she said the workers tell her.

Ulrich's first trip to India came in 1998, when she helped implement a quilting and weaving program in Kodaikanal, where her sister was working at the time. In the beginning, she said, the business was "a few women doing crafty things." When DeJong took over, she opened a shop in town, taught the women to sew and create other, more intricate crafts. The business grew quickly.

Blue Mango began with four women and a few grants, after DeJong and her husband moved out of a village to have more land.

Ulrich has since gone to India to work at Blue Mango seven times, for at least a month each trip. She rooms in the guest house on her sister's property, a short walk from the Blue Mango studios.

"I walk down a path to Blue Mango every morning," Ulrich said. "It's very lush, very tropical, very beautiful."

Southern India is much more relaxed and tropical than Northern India, Ulrich said. Think coconut palm and papaya trees.

Ulrich's duties vary, including designing new products, researching what colors and styles are popular and reassessing existing designs. Being a longtime textile artist, she also teaches a fine stitching class.

Ulrich grew up in Madagascar, finished high school in South Africa, and came to the U.S. for college and married an American. She moved to Maryland in 1985 and was a stay-at-home mom for 22 years, raising three daughters (all of her daughters have since traveled to India to help with Blue Mango).

She began selling fair trade products and was doing well with baskets made in Madagascar -- selling to the National Geographic store and the Smithsonian store -- until civil war broke out there in 2003.

"My business came to a grinding halt," she said.

She decided to start a new business with Blue Mango products, called Red Persimmon (theredpersimmon.com) and now sells her wares at Eastern Market and at the Dragonfly Art Cooperative in Frederick .

After having recently returned from a trip to India, Ulrich stood in Dragonfly and pointed out a red bag made from banana fiber, from a banana tree (Blue Mango buys all its materials from India). She showed photos from her trip that reveal the long process of the material going from tree to bag, including washing it, hanging it to dry, combing it, spinning it and weaving it. She learned most of the process through the Internet.

She summarized her trip, telling about her work with small groups and tea time, which comes twice a day.

"It's one of the joys to me, walking in and seeing them all at their machines, and they say, 'Good morning, Madam' -- they call me Madam," she said. "I make it a point to learn their names, and some of their names aren't easy."