Monday, February 12, 2007

A pin-prick for justice


Last night we attached the keys to our earrings to complete the look destined to take the fashion world by storm.....


It felt odd and gets caught on my scarf. But over a quarter a million children are trafficked into West African cocoa production areas to harvest the raw material for our lunchtime chocolate treat.

According to the US State department
many of these children are under 12 years-of-age, sold into indentured servitude for $140 and
work 12-hour days for $135 to $189 per year.

Like the flow of migrants across our planet, these statistics show how desperate families are to scrape a living in some parts of the world. Stop the Traffik is lifting the lid on this in a way that might get people changing their behaviour in the west to make a token difference for some of those lives and put pressure on governments to make real and substantial changes in the terms of trade between rich and poor nations.

I think my ear can stand a little discomfort for that (not wanting to sound too po-faced and juster-than-thou about it!)

Oh and here's me and Jonathan together:

4 comments:

Stuart Blythe said...

So - how is the ear? U going to keep it - the piercing I mean - not the ear?

Anonymous said...

Haven't heard of Stop the Traffik - thanks for highlighting it. Going to get something about it put in our monthly church mag. Margaret

Stuart Blythe said...

I think that you should put this picture in for a caption competition.

Anonymous said...

Simon you really do look a bit manic in that pic, was it really that bad?

When I went to Congo, '96 I think, we went to a coffee plantation where kids were getting about 20p per 25 kilo bag of beans to sort through them by hand to pick out bad beans, in the dark! They switched on the lights so Delyth and I could see what they were doing!This was better for the parents than sending them to the plantation school. I think they could do about 2 bags a day, so that's about £150 per annum, nothing changes eh?