A (SORT OF) Fair Trade Easter

My mother and I walked into the Warehouse. She was going to buy the easter eggs for my younger sisters.

"I was going to make some Easter eggs though."

"Okay, so I'll just get a couple."

"I'll be impressed if you can even buy 'FairTrade' chocolate."

"Okay."

But I knew that there is only one 'FairTrade' easter egg avaliable in New Zealand stores. There are no organic eggs. There are no eggs that are verifiably made from non West African cocoa beans. This is why it is really hard to be ethical in New Zealand.

As you can read about on my other posts, even if chocolate is marked "Fair Trade" it is not necessarally produced ethically, but there are some ways in which that is better. 

When Mum realisd that, she brought some of the Cadbury FairTrade Dairymilk eggs. Then she brought some "white chocolate" with little cocoa content, and a few packets of other eggs.

If you want to try buying white chocolate as a slightly better solution over buying regular uncertified chocolate, look at the ingredients on the packet. Some white 'chocolate' contains no actual cocoa content. It is simply a chocolate style confectionary with sugar and solid vegetable fat. Unlike other kinds of chocolate, there usually won't be any cocoa powder, but if the ingredients say "cocoa fat" "Theobroma oil" or "cocoa butter" then the chocolate definately contains cocoa. If the ingredients say "vegetable fats" it's possible that there is some cocoa fat in but more likely it's just a mixture of other cheaper fats. 

I used the Trade Aid recipe that I posted below. I found it more convienient to make small egg shaped balls of ganache and then dip them in chocolate, and set them on a plate, rather than to leave them setting on spoons. The result had a flat bottom but were still great tasting easter eggs and were fins once wrapped in foil. I also made marshemellow eggs which I loved. To make them, fill a dish with flour, make indents into the flour with a tablespoon, make some marshmellow (by adding gelatine to hot sugar and beating it until it's frothy. If you can't find a recipe, comment below and I'll find one to put on here) and spoon marshmellow into the spoon indents. Leave them until they set, them scoop them out, coat them in chocolate, and join two together to make two halves of a marshemellow egg with a thick crunchy bit of chocolate in the middle -YUM- Trade Aid dark chocolate really has a good effect with the sweetness of the marshemellow.

Trade Aid one-minute recipe: Home crafted chocolate eggs

My second trip to India.

Hello, welcome to my blog. If you are new and came just to read about my recent visit to India, this blog is all about my commitment to contribute as little as possible to human exploitation and poverty. Today I'm writing about my second short term mission trip to India.

I was signed up to a Cambodia Philippines team since the beginning of the year, but I switched teams at the last minute to a Sri Lanka team. I didn't truly want to go to Sri Lanka, but I believed God wanted me to switch to that team. About a week before I was supposed to leave home, I was told the Sri Lanka team had been cancelled due to political problems and the missionary pulling out. The three leaders and seven teenage girls including myself were to be sent to India instead. I was ecstatic about going back to the country I had fallen in love with the year before.

Before going to India, my team trained in the lord's boots camp and learned some basic building and ministry skills. If you are not familiar with Teen Missions' programme, you can read about it at http://www.teenmissions.org/about/

We got to Vijayawada, India late at night after two and a half days of traveling. The next day, we set up our living space and looked around the Teen Missions base. It had developed a lot since my visit eleven months before. 

Jan 2014, we made the concrete foundation for a duck pond.

Dec 2014, the completed duck pond next to the ready to harvest paddies

Jan 2014, Hanging out on a bench by the palm oil trees.

Dec 2014, Hanging out on the same bench.

Soon, we began our main project, building a wall around Teen Missions India. This would help them to meet new regulations and ultimately keep their ministry of training young Indian Christians going.

We arrived and it looked like this. Just a trail of concrete with half done steels sticking out of it. We would have to put moulds over the steels, and pour concrete into them to create pillars. Some of the steels needed to be tied first. Then we would be able to start laying bricks in the gaps between the pillars.

 Most of the time someone was working in the kitchen helping our cook leader, and someone was on prayer duty, or someone was sick, and we sometimes had only four team members on the worksite, but we stuck to our work constantly. We seemed to get a lot done quickly.

And then we learned -I  re-learned, the art of laying bricks "Indian style". The method was not quite the same as the one we practiced every day of bootcamp, because we had different tools and a different kind of brick. This photo was taken shortly before we finished. We finished all the lower level concrete pillars of the wall, half of the upper level pillars, and layed four half sections and a quarter section of bricks. We didn't have enough time or people to finish the entire wall, but we got a good start on it. This wall needs to be eight feet high. Other people in India are finishing it now.

In break times and during our evening devotion sessions, and when they helped us with our work, we got to know the Indian BMW students. BMW stands for Bible, Missions, and Work. These girls and boys went through a Teen Missions summer programme just like ours; their teams travel within India rather than overseas, so they got to help their own people. And now they are studying

In our last week, we got to visit the WON church again. (My other team had worked with them for a week last time) We helped them to level out the rubble of a building they had demolished ready to build the foundations of a new church, and to move some firewood, and to straighten out fence posts and pull weeds. I was really excited to see that they are now running their orphanage out of the sight that we did a lot of work on last year.

We played games with these children and performed a puppet show play for them, telling them a shepherd story Jesus told. Then we gave them each of them some special presents, a pair of slip on shoes, and some writing books and pens, and a wordless bracelet or small gift. They seemed thrilled with their present.

We also visited the leprosy colony, where I had also worked last year. It was set up many years ago as a place to house those effected by the terrible skin disease, leprosy, away from society. Today, there are still a few people living there who have the scars and deformation of leprosy, but their children also live there. We were told this was a begging supported community. Teen Missions has been trying to build relationships with this community. The children performed a little song for us.

We spent a day in Hyderabad before we left, and met some of our awesome brothers and sisters in Christ there. It was really great fellowship. I will always remember the little music session we had in a corner of their church hall where they taught us a song in Telugu, and we jammed, in English, in Telugu, in Spanish, in Maori, and in some other languages, knowing God heard all of it the same.

We also got to do some last minute tourism, taking one last look around the country we had mysteriously fallen in love with along the way.

Following a long wait in Hyderabad airport as our flight was delayed, and trying to stay awake until boarding just before midnight, and a really uncomfortable nap on the plane, and a meal at about 2am, I found myself at Singapore airport trying to work out why everyone didn't look Indian. I was tired. Cut me some slack. We met up with the South Africa Teen Missions team, who were travelling back on the same flight to Australia.  We spent five days in Tewantin, Australia, listening to more sermons and thinking about keeping our commitments and relationships with God once we returned home. This is one reason why Teen Missions is a unique experience that changes people. 

I hope you enjoyed reading about this trip. Last year my post about my missions trip got more views than any other post on this blog, but I'd really like it if you look at some of my other posts. I'd love it even more if you followed my blog or left comments. But what would be even more wonderful is if you used the information on it to influence the things you buy. That could have a really lasting effect on other people.

Please e-mail companies and ask them to make their products trafficking free.

On this blog, I talk about not buying products produced using slavery. I tell you how to tell which  products to avoid, and which ones you can buy instead. But sometimes there are products you can't avoid buying.

Today I have heard of a web page that makes it easy for you to e-mail companies and ask them to take steps toward making their products trafficking free. This is part of the work of Stop The Traffik The URL for this page is http://traffikfree.org/ 

They have a pre-written message that you can send via your email address without leaving the website. You can edit the message if you like. They have a link in the message to their protocol which will help the company to make changes, and getting your email will show them that the issue is important to their customers.

Know the issues; sugar

Sugar.
Sweet, fattening, diabetes inducing sugar.
While we know it's unhealthy and wish we didn't, most of us eat a lot of sugar.
I don't know about you, but my family has always bought the cheapest bag of sugar from the supermarket shelf. But it would have so much of a better effect on the producers of our sugar if we could buy fairly traded organic sugar instead.

Our demand for cheap sugar creates a demand for sugar to be grown cheaply. Although countries like the US and Australia grow sugar cane, many other countries that grow it are "developing countries" The demand for cheap sugar creates a demand for cheap labour. In many cases people are exploited to harvest it.

One example is Dominican Bateyes.
In the Dominican Republic, migrants from Haiti, more recently, the children of migrants, make up a large amount of the workers for sugar plantations. Most of these plantations have company housing called bateys. These bateys are often badly maintained, and often there is limited access to health care or school, meaning the children born there end up in a cycle, having no other choice but to work in the same industry as their parents. The pay is not very good, and people do not have the means to get out.

Bateyes, and batey like places exist in other countries. In many other countries where sugar is grown, people have similar problems. Our desire for the cheapest sugar available doesn't help the equality of these workers.

There are some groups and charities working to improve conditions in these places. We can donate to these chatities to help, but when we are buying the product, we have an opportunity to make difference. Buying fairly traded and organic sugar means more money can be spent on labour which provides income for farmers and farm workers. It's also a good idea to look for co-operatives that fund community projects like medical care, school uniforms, and education. Most fair trade products come from such co-operatives. It's also worth while finding out what country your sugar is grown in.


Sources and more information;
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-j-powers/dominican-bateyes_b_1547082.html
http://www.thebateyfoundation.org/about/
http://bateyrelief.org/work/

Know the issue; Human conditions in cocoa production

To see the first part to this series;

http://irefusetoeatthat.blogspot.co.nz/2013/06/know-issue-what-is-cocao.html

In the previous part of this series, I gave some basic information on what cocoa is. In this part I will be giving information on the ethics of producing cocoa. Because a lot of work is involved to produce cocoa, it is not easy to produce it cheaply. There are concerns that low market prices of cocoa can drive producers into poverty, and even cause some to resort to slave labour to make money.

A major issue people are becoming more aware of  in cocoa production is human trafficking. Children are cheap labour. It is believed that children are sometimes kidnapped, sometimes sold by family members, and sometimes smuggled from nearby countries to work on cocoa farms in the Ivory Coast and Ghana. These children are not given proper training to handle the dangerous work involved in processing cacao. (Climbing up trees and cutting fruit down with machetes.)  When every company is trying to make their chocolate cheap, it can actually be hard for farmers not to resort to this kind of practice to make their business work. Some people dispute whether cocoa slaves actually still exist. You are free to make you own mind up.  In the film The dark side of chocolate, Ali Lakiss, the owner of Saf-Cacao, one of Ghana's biggest cocoa exporters, said "There are no children in the plantations." He obviously has a lot to gain from people believing that. Journalists have filmed children working in cocoa farms. Some children do so part time and also go school. But from what I have seen, I think theirs enough evidence to believe children are being, or have been exploited in cocoa production, and I feel we, those who eat chocolate, should do something about it.

When we buy chocolate, some of the money that companies make will go toward making more chocolate, right? So if you buy chocolate, how can you make sure it doesn't come from these farms that are enslaving people?

I know you want me to tell you what brands to buy, but I can't. There are many different solutions 
#1. Fair trading
Fair Trade and other similarly labeled products are purchased from the farmers at more than a minimum Fairtrade price. People believe buying Fairtrade certified chocolate, means there are no issues with the production of the chocolate. Unfortunately, this is not true. Fairtrade chocolate is usually purchased from a co-op where all farmers are paid (and sometimes contracted to) a price. Fair trade can improve the living conditions of people who grow cocoa. This can have positive effects farmers who do the right thing. On their employees, employees' families, and their communities. However, we are worried that some farmers will sell their cocoa at a fairtrade price, and still use slaves. Most of the time the organisations that certify cocoa cannot completely make sure slaves are not used. 

#2 Boycotting Ivory Coast Cocoa.
Ghana and the Ivory Coast are the only places where people claim cocoa slavery is happening. Many people boycott cocoa from the Ivory Coast and Ghana. The Food Empowerment Project  has produced a comprehensive list of cocoa brands that buy cocoa from other areas like south America rather than Ghana and the Ivory Coast. They only research vegan products, but have a long list regardless. If there is a company that is not on the list, you can sometimes find information on their website or through sending them an email asking them. While this does provide us with a way not to impact the West African cocoa slaves, boycotting a country is only a temporary solution. Many people in West Africa do rely on the chocolate industry for income. Also, some of the other countries we buy cocoa from could have problems with exploitation, just less reported. What we eventually need to do is to work with producers. 

#3 Direct action to improve conditions
The more direct relationship a chocolate producer has with farmers and small co-operatives that have good relationships with farmers, the more control we can have over their practices. In the past, companies have signed famous agreements promising to stop slave labour in West African cocoa farms. So far, not enough has been done. When media attention dies down, it's forgotten about again. If you want to encourage companies you buy from to do more, please send them annoying letters and emails. Some groups are starting to do this well, and to make a difference in the lives of farming families, but many do not. 

I believe it is your responsibility to research this for yourself. I have been researching for years for myself. I am passionate about encouraging other people to make good decisions, and although I think my opinion is clear, I am not telling anyone else what to think. Chose which way you are most comfortable buying. But please don't do nothing.

Also visit; 
http://www.slavefreechocolate.org/index.html

End it.

Slavery, or human trafficking, is the main theme of this blog. 

Slavery was 'abolished' in the US a long time ago, and now the African American people are no longer slaves. However, America, and every other western country, still has slaves. They just can't see them. 

A slave is a person who is perceived as being owned by another person, forced to do work or carry out orders, and who is not sufficiently paid. The truth is, many of the goods western society consumes are made by workers in such conditions. 

My blog focuses on food. Did you know that it is estimated more than 70% of  the coco the in the world is produced in west Africa? Did you know that children are commonly sold or bonded to coco farms in throughout West Africa? Although the general public in these countries often think this is a myth, the evidence, in my point of view, that these children are trafficked in the chocolate industry is overwhelming.

In many places factories where people work long hours for less than legal wages. These people may not be 'owned' (although in some countries they are trafficked into the industry) Workers in China often come from far areas of their country to work in factories and have to live in factory dorm housing, rarely leaving the factory. They are paid very low wages per hours and often work overtime just to make money. Being tired and not having proper safety equipment means there will be accidents in the workplace. 

Also there is a kind of slavery we don't all contribute to. Many young girls, younger than myself, are sold to brothels. 

It is estimated there are 27 million victims of human trafficking in the world. Today, on the 27th of February, there was an awareness movement where people around the world who drew red Xs on their hands and told their friends about slavery. The X shows that they won't stand for slavery and want it to end. I joined them. And that's why I am putting up this blog post today. To shine a light on the invisible slaves of the world. The world has forgotten them, their pain, and their lives, but we know they are there. I won't allow them to be ignored any longer. I just told you.