Photos by Tom Price

Dustin Woida can’t explain exactly how he came up with the plan: to turn old burlap coffee sacks into fashionable bags and use the profits to help prostitutes in Central America.

“I saw someone selling the coffee sacks online some where -- eBay I think,” the 25-year-old Merced native recently recalled. “I saw them and I thought, What could you do with those?”

Within a matter of hours, he’d sketched out his first bag and a business plan. “It just sort of happened,” he explained.

Woida is the founder of Making an Escape, a homemade effort that puts all its profits toward ending prostitution and sex work in Costa Rica. He launched his company in February and sold his first bag this June.

It works like this: Woida buys the coffee sacks in bulk from all over the world. He designs the bags and cuts the fabric himself. Until recently, he contracted the sewing out to developmentally disable adults who are paid for their work through the Howard Training Center, a nonprofit in Modesto. A friend in San Diego has helped Woida with marketing; otherwise he pulls the whole thing off on his own.

Every bag is handcrafted and numbered, and no two bags look the same. They cost $15 each to make. Woida sells them for $40. All of the profits go to Students International, a Christian missionary organization based in Visalia that helps the poor in several developing countries.

Woida said money from Making an Escape bags is being saved to fund a women’s center in Desamparados, Costa Rica, where prostitutes will be able to go with their children for resources, support and skills training to get them off the streets.

And there’s more to his plan. Late last month Woida moved from Merced to Desamparados, where he plans to set up a bag production shop to provide prostitutes with an alternative means of making a living. He hopes to have it up and running by January.

“The idea is to eventually get one girl off the streets for one day with one bag,” said Woida, who sports tattoos and long dark hair that he pulls back tightly.
He is a paid employee of Students International, but he keeps none of the profits from Making an Escape. “I’m not concerned with making money off this -- except to support these women,” he said. “The only goal is to change the options and the circumstances for them and for their children.”

Woida, who graduated from Fresno State in 2008, first traveled to Costa Rica three-and-a-half years ago on a Students International mission. That’s when he became aware of the country’s widespread sex tourism industry, fueled by laws that allow girls as young as 16 to trade sex for money. “It’s just huge there,” Woida said. “But it doesn’t have to be that way.”

So far Woida has sold about 150 Making an Escape bags. Besides online, buyers can find the bags at downtown’s Forte Frozen Yogurt, which displays and sells them at no charge.

For more information on Making an Escape or to purchase a bag, go to www.myspace.com/makinganescape.

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