Jun 13, 2026

Jewelry That Gives Back to the Women of Bali

by Erin Kandoll

The word is Mewali. It means the kindness comes back around.

A handmade silver collection, an extraordinary midwife named Robin Lim, and the Balinese word that started it all.

There is a word in Bali for the thing that comes after thank you.

When someone thanks you in Balinese, they say Suksma (sook-su-ma). And the answer, the thing you say back, is Mewali(meh-wah-lee). Most people translate it as “you’re welcome,” but that is not quite what it means. Mewali means in return. Say the fuller phrase, suksma mewali, and you are not closing the exchange. You are returning the gratitude. Thank you, returned. Now both people are holding it.

That is not a formality there. It is the texture of ordinary life. I felt it in nearly every encounter. The genuine warmth, the way a stranger meets your eyes and means it, the small bow, the smile that is actually a smile. Kindness in Bali does not travel in one direction and stop. It comes back around, and it keeps moving.

That is the whole reason this collection exists, and the reason it is named for the return. Bali gave Twisted Ginger its hands and its heart. You gave it wings. This is my Mewali, my way of saying it back, because none of it was ever mine alone.

Twisted Ginger did not grow alone, and it is so much more than the techniques, though those matter too. The granulation, the small and patient work that takes generations of hands to learn, came from the workshops of Bali. The people there shared techniques most makers guard for a lifetime, and they taught me freely, so I could carry them home to my own studio.

The dream is older than the collection.

You may not know this about me, but part of my drive in growing this business has always been the goal of helping women and children around the world in a bigger way, alongside the causes I hold close here at home.

Nearly a decade ago, I traveled through Southeast Asia with my own son. And everywhere we went, I saw need. So much of it is carried by women and children, and so much of it is invisible to anyone not looking. I came home wanting to help everyone I could, in every direction at once, the way your heart does before it has a plan.

My husband said something then that changed my direction: find a way to make your impact go further, and give it structure.

So that became the quiet blueprint. I set out to build Twisted Ginger into something strong enough to carry that dream. Strong enough that the giving would not depend on a good month or a generous mood. Strong enough that it could simply be how the business works.

We reached that milestone on my 40th birthday because of your support. It was proof that this little business was finally standing on ground solid enough to breathe life into those dreams. And right around that same moment, the plan and the people found each other in a way I never could have orchestrated.

You are about to meet them.

But the real story is what happened when my business outgrew what my own two hands could make.

One thing was never up for discussion. Every single piece of Twisted Ginger Jewelry would be made by hand. I could have moved to casting and saved myself a fortune in margin, but I am in love with the craft of silversmithing, and I believe this work belongs in human hands. So when I needed help, I was not looking for a machine. I was looking for more hands like mine, more hearts that felt the same love for the craft.

My mentor, Tracy Matthews, watched me break under the weight of trying to do it all alone. She understood something I did not yet: what becomes possible when you stop insisting on making every single piece yourself and learn to trust a team.

But I could not hand my work to people I had never met. I needed to meet the hands. I needed to sit beside the people who would be making my jewelry and feel their hearts.

So I flew half a world away to Bali, a young creative turned entrepreneur who did not yet know how to be a professional designer, or how any of this really worked. I just had a feeling in my gut that I was supposed to go. Before I left, I talked back and forth with my now dear friend Janet. She and Nina founded this place, a workshop in Bali owned and run by women, and the moment we sat down together, the gut feeling made sense. Janet felt like a mother to me from the very first conversation, warm and steady, the kind of person you trust before you can explain why.

Almost forty years ago, Janet and her co-owner, Nina, built this company from the ground up. And from the very start, they did something almost no one around them was doing. They lifted the women into higher-paying roles, into management, into leadership, back when that simply was not how it was done.

They have spent their lives proving that a business can be built on the strength of women, and be all the stronger for it. I understood this from our very first conversation, and I knew at once that this was the team I wanted to bring my creations to life.

From the very first year, I asked for something that, I would learn, no one had ever asked for before. I wanted to sit down and silversmith beside them. They looked at me a little funny. Most of the people they work with are designers, not makers, people who hand over a drawing and wait for the result. But I needed more than that. It mattered deeply to me that we understood the craft together, that I could sit at the bench beside them and feel the exact energy and care that go into every piece with my name on it.

So that is what we did. And somewhere in the years since, it became our tradition, the way we close out every trip. Now they save me a spot at the bench and a little offering of my own. They light up with the giddiest delight watching me fumble through their old foot-pumped bellows torches, while I do my best not to set the whole place on fire. We laugh, and I mean, we really laugh. Trading techniques without a shared word between us. We may not speak the same language, but we definitely speak in silver.

Here is what I need you to understand. These are not my workers.

They are my friends, this is my Bali family.

The hands that carry my imagination out of my head and into the world, and make it real. I do not send a design across an ocean and wait for a box to arrive. I sit with them. I learn from them. I hand them the thing I love most, and somewhere along the way, they began to hand me their trust in return.

This year I finally got to meet Nina, to hear her story and everything she has carried, and it felt like a circle quietly closing. Two women who spent decades lifting other women, now part of lifting me, and me getting to help lift the women of Bali in return. The year after we first met, Janet introduced me to Robin Lim and Bumi Sehat, because she already understood what I wanted: to let this business give back as it grew.

This is year three of our partnership now. We grow more every single time, far beyond anything I let myself imagine, because my clients keep coming home to us, and because of what these hands can make together.

So $15 from every Mewali Meadows piece sold goes to Bumi Sehat, the foundation I have come to love, for the women who made this work possible.

One piece, one woman.

Keep reading, I will show you exactly what I mean.

Who the giving goes to

Bumi Sehat means Healthy Mother Earth.

It was founded by Robin Lim, known across Bali simply as Ibu Robin, a midwife and a >>2011 CNN Hero of the Year. What began as care for mothers in one village now reaches four clinics in Indonesia and two in the Philippines.

Before you read another word from me, let CNN show you.

This short film is why the world met Robin, and it holds the two images I cannot shake: mothers sleeping on newspapers outside hospitals, waiting because they cannot pay to bring their babies home, and then Robin's clinic, where every mother knows she will be cared for exactly as a wealthy woman would be. A midwife. A safe birth. The dignity she deserved all along.

Seven minutes. Worth every one.

>>WATCH: CNN's Story of Robin Lim and Bumi Sehat

They do so much more than I understood. They catch babies and sit with the elderly. They take in women fleeing horrific situations, and provide free natural births to mothers coming in off the street in active labor. They run a cancer screening lab for early detection and a youth center, send midwives into schools to answer the questions teenagers are afraid to ask, and show up in disaster zones with mattresses and dry clothes when the floods come. And all of it, for anyone who walks through the door, is free or by donation.

Robin said it to me plainly. “Everyone deserves care, no matter their race, their religion, where they come from, what they do, or how much money they have. None of that should decide whether a mother and her baby live.”

What We Actually Did

This kind of care is new here, and it is not simple. For many of these women, their bodies have never been examined, or even talked about. Cancer, natural childbirth, risk, prevention, the things that quietly decide whether a woman lives or dies, all of it has sat behind a wall of silence. Many of them have rarely left their own villages.

So this year, with the team at Bumi Sehat, we brought the conversation to them.

So this year, Twisted Ginger hosted a Socialization, a gathering where Bumi Sehat's nurses came to the workshop in Bali to teach the women who make my jewelry directly, as well as the wives and daughters of the men who work alongside them. They taught them what to look for. How to check their own bodies. Risk factors and prevention. Why a screening is worth a day away from work. We covered the teaching, the rides to get there (since most of them have no car), and the screenings themselves.

I will be honest with you. I was on edge. I was an outsider, standing up to raise the most private subject there is, in a culture that does not speak of it openly, through a translator, wondering the whole time how it would be received. So I just told them the only truth I had. That I have a daughter. That I had my own scare once, a lump that frightened me badly, and that without a way to know, I would have been left to simply wonder and hope.

That catching these things early is how we stop dying young. Not only for us. For our daughters, and for theirs after them.

And then I looked up.

They were smiling at me. Nodding. Meeting me right where I stood. After all my worry about overstepping, after the translator and the held breath, they were smiling. And I felt the trust move in both directions at once. Them, believing I meant it. Me, understanding that this is the work I was put here to do.

I have never been more sure of anything.

Robin has heard what these women say when no one brings it up. “If I have cancer, I would rather not know,” they tell her, “because we do not have the transportation or the money to see an oncologist. It is better if I just die quietly at home.” That is the silence we were breaking in that room.

Because when a screening catches something early, the treatment can happen right there, for free, and a woman does not have to die young simply because she was too busy keeping everyone else alive. “While the women are busy tending to their families, we are busy tending to them,” said Robin, with a warm-hearted smile.

And Bumi Sehat thinks of everything. They will send a woman home from her screening with a sack of rice and some cooking oil, just for taking the day to come, so that caring for herself never means her family goes without dinner.

That is what changing a life actually looks like up close. It is not grand. It is rice, a ride, and someone finally saying, “You matter too.”

We opened it to seventy-one women, the ones who work there and the wives and daughters of the men who do. About half came, and nearly every one who came signed up for her first screening. For a change this big, in a place where none of this has ever been said out loud, that is an enormous, YES!

What I hope for now is a ripple. That these women go home, tell the others, and bring them next time, until looking after themselves is simply what these women do. Twisted Ginger will be there, continuing to support these women, every step of the way.

An Update, Because the Story Kept Moving

In early July, the first of these women went for their screenings. The same women who sat in that room, who smiled and nodded and signed up, walked through Bumi Sehat's doors. And the invitation does not expire. The care stays open for every woman from that room, because that is how this grows here. A few go first. They come home and say it was okay. And next time, more come.

I do not have the words for what that feels like from half a world away. The wall of silence we stood in front of together is coming down, one appointment at a time. And these funds will help carry these women through whatever their journeys hold.

The Promise, Kept: One Piece, One Woman

When I first wrote this post, I told you I was building a permanent way for this collection to give back, and that when it arrived, I would show you exactly how it works. The collection is here.

So here it is, plain and true:

$15 from every Mewali Meadows piece sold goes to Bumi Sehat. Every piece. Every time.

Whether it finds you through this website, across my festival booth table, or from a shop shelf in another state, the $15 rides along, and not one cent of it stays with me. And that number is not one I picked because it sounded nice. When it came time to decide what this collection would give, I wanted to know what it actually costs to make a difference in one woman's life. So I looked at the project you just read about, the one funded for the women and families of the hands that bring my jewelry to life, and I did the math. It came to about $15 per woman.

And here is everything that $15 holds. The teaching that comes first, where many of these women learn about their own bodies, cervical cancer, and childbirth for the very first time in their lives, knowledge I had taken for granted my whole life. Then her doctors and her midwives. Her screening, with treatment right there if something is found. And the little bag of rice and cooking oil she carries home, so that caring for herself never means her family goes without dinner.

One piece, one woman...and wherever the need is greatest, from screenings to safe births.

And the hope now has a number, too. Bumi Sehat's dream for 2026 is to reach 1,672 women across the fourteen villages of Desa Peliatan. Since this screening work began, roughly one in seven women screened has had something found early enough to treat. Early enough to stop.

Sit with that for a second. One in seven.

That is what a room full of women learning, and a $15 visit, can mean: years a woman would not have had.

A daughter who gets to keep her mother.

Four times a year, Bumi Sehat sends word home about the women this work has reached, and every time it arrives, I will bring it straight to you, right here and on the VIP list. This is not a campaign that ends. It is the way this collection works, for as long as it exists.

And it is only the beginning. In the coming year, I will be growing this giving in ways I cannot wait to share.

When I wrote to Robin and the Bumi Sehat team to make this commitment official, their answer brought me to tears all over again. "We are truly honored to be part of the Mewali Meadows journey," they wrote, calling Twisted Ginger a friend and partner who shares their vision of ensuring every woman has access to compassionate, respectful, and life-saving care.

The honor, I promise you, is mine.

That is the math that keeps me up at night. How little it costs to change a whole life. Fifteen dollars.

If This Speaks To You

You do not have to buy anything to be part of this. Bumi Sehat runs on donations from everyday people who work hard and care, and a little goes a remarkably long way there. Robin says it better than I can. “We are the hands,” she told me, “and you are the heart.”

DONATE TO BUMI SEHAT - any amount no matter how big or small can make a huge Ripple of change. I've seen it first hand. This work is changing and saving lives every single day.

DONATE HERE >> Bumi Sehat Donation

And if you have ever bought a piece of Twisted Ginger, you were already part of this before it had a name. The socialization you just read about was funded by this little business, which means it was funded by you.

Suksma.

This is the give and the take. Alaska and Bali. Woman to woman. Thank you, and in return.

This is Mewali.

The full Mewali Meadows collection drops on July 21st. If you want to be the first to know when it does, and to follow where this giving goes next, come join my VIP list. It is where all of this unfolds first.

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