In Senegal, domestic violence survivors craft hope in silver

Growing up in Senegal, it never crossed Ndeymour’s mind that she could become a silversmith. From what she had seen, soldering and shaping silver was hard, dirty work, and it was done exclusively by men. 

Then, two years ago, she felt obliged to do something else that she had never imagined for herself: flee an abusive partner. Pregnant and homeless, she found her way to a Dakar women’s shelter. And when the owner asked her to join a silversmith training program, she already knew she was capable of a new kind of life. She immediately said yes. 

Today, Ndeymour, who has asked to be identified only by her first name for her safety, works at Green Wave, a woman-owned jewelry store in the upscale Dakar neighborhood of Almadies. In a tidy green-walled workshop decorated with potted cactuses, she and six other women who survived domestic violence craft bespoke silver jewelry. They are reclaiming agency over their lives as they heal from their traumas together.  

“I realized that I can do what a man can do, and working here gave me a chance to show that,” she says. “I take pride in that.”

Power in creation

Ndeymour’s story is not uncommon in Senegal. One in 4 women of ages 15 to 49 have faced physical violence as adults or adolescents, according to Senegalese government statistics. In more than half of the cases, the perpetrator is their husband or partner. 

These women often have nowhere to turn to. According to the same statistics, two-thirds of women who survive violence never tell anyone about it or seek help. In many cases, they know their families would reject them for leaving their marriages – particularly when they have children – because doing so is seen as selfish. Meanwhile, although Senegal recently changed its rape law to make the potential punishment more severe, women’s rights advocates say many women remain fearful of reporting.

There are also few women’s shelters in Senegal, and women fleeing domestic violence often have little education and few formal job skills. This puts them at risk of becoming homeless, being forced into dangerous jobs like sex work, or having to return to the violent households from which they fled, says Harriet Batchelor, the British silversmith who runs Green Wave. 

Ms. Batchelor spent part of her career working with projects to fight domestic violence in Kenya, where she saw firsthand how important it was for survivors to enjoy continued social support and financial stability after leaving a shelter.

Meanwhile, on weekends she pursued her other passion, making silver jewelry.

When she moved to Dakar in 2020, Ms. Batchelor decided to merge her two professions by starting a silver workshop where the artisans would be survivors of domestic violence.

“There is incredible power in creation,” she says. There is “a sense of self-worth from creating something tangible.”

To find women to train as silversmiths, Ms. Batchelor turned to a Dakar women’s shelter called Maison Rose. 

Located in a bustling neighborhood on the outskirts of the city, the famous “pink house” has housed thousands of survivors of gender-based violence since it opened in 2008. 

On a recent morning, a woman watched a group of toddlers crawling and tottering across the shelter’s rooftop terrace as laundry fluttered in the wind behind them. Meanwhile, on the ground floor, another group of women and children were painting, part of a workshop to help them overcome anxiety and trauma. 

Ndeymour, who is in her early 30s, arrived here in the fall of 2021, heavily pregnant. After she left her abusive partner, her mother had kicked her out too.

“I was a person with no hope about anything,” she says of herself then. “All my dreams were gone.”

Over the next nine months, she says the shelter slowly brought her back to life. She met women in similar situations to hers who had rebuilt their lives from the ground up, and they helped her find the strength to do the same.  

“You can see the transformation in [these women’s] eyes – they leave their baggage here,” says Mona Chasserio, the French pharmacist who founded Maison Rose. 

But women cannot stay at the shelter forever. After about six months, depending on their situation, Maison Rose asks them to move on. Many take cleaning jobs, one of the few professions in urban Senegal open to women without a formal education. On a salary of about $50 a month, however, the women often struggle to support themselves. 

“A family around a dinner table”

As her departure from Maison Rose approached, Ndeymour wondered where she and her newborn daughter would go next. Then Ms. Chasserio asked her if she was interested in joining a three-month silversmithing workshop run by Ms. Batchelor. 

Ndeymour jumped at the chance, especially because Ms. Batchelor was proposing a job at the end of the training. Her starting full-time salary at Green Wave would be five times what she could make as a cleaner, and she would earn more as she became more experienced.  

She learned all the stages of silversmithing, from designing to sawing, filing, soldering, and finishing. Now, Ndeymour works four days a week at the workshop and will soon manage it when her boss is away. 

For Ndeymour, the experience has been transformative in other ways as well. At Maison Rose, she met a young mother of three who had also fled an abusive partner. 

The two of them struck up a friendship, and when they moved out of the shelter to work at Green Wave, they pooled their wages to rent a small apartment together. They each alternated work with watching their children. Now, after almost six months living together and saving money, they are preparing to move again – this time to their own individual places. 

Ms. Batchelor says that Ndeymour and her other colleagues have taught her how powerful it can be to work through trauma collectively. She feels lucky to work in a place where people speak so openly about what they have survived. 

“Just like a family around a dinner table, there’s a strength of community that’s formed from sitting around a workbench,” she says.

For her part, Ndeymour says she will never look back. On a recent afternoon at the Almadies workshop, she gracefully filed a silver ring with surgical precision – a far cry from the way her hands trembled when she first started the work.

“I have become a solid wall,” she says. “I can’t be broken down or hurt now.”