Hope in a Bag
On a family trip to Colombia in 2019, Aline Nalbandian (BA/BEd ’99) visited a rural marketplace in the north of the country, where she spied a stall overflowing with colourful, handwoven totes. She drew closer, attracted by a bag of jungle-green and parrot-blue called a mochila. Speaking through a translator, she learned that the bags are made by the Wayuu, an Indigenous matrilineal society whose weaving traditions have been passed down from woman to woman for generations.