Chocolate matters

April 4, 2007

I watched an article on Newsnight last week about the exploitation of child labour on the cocoa farms of the Ivory coast. The BBC web site recently posted a similar article about how child Cocoa workers are still exploited. The likelihood is that the chocolate we eat day-to-day is made at least in part from cocoa beans grown on farms where children are slaves.

Frankly this is shocking – that thousands of children are still being forced to work as slaves so that one luxury product for us can be a few pence cheaper. As always the issues are complex, and need the government’s involvement, are greatly exacerbated by corruption, are ultimately caused by extreme poverty and will not be easily solved. But my heart goes out to these children who face grave risks and are forced to work with no reward for what reason? Surely more can be done?

Fortunately there is some chocolate that is guaranteed to be ‘traffik free’, such as fair trade chocolate – see the Stop The Traffik website for more details. I’m often a bit lethargic about campaigns, but I just can’t rest in my heart in being lethargic about this. I think we should all refuse to buy any chocolate that might be produced as a result of child labour. Effectively this limits us to buying fair trade chocolate and fair trade chocolate products.

This involves some sacrifice. Only buying fair trade chcoclate bars isn’t so hard – they’re a bit more expensive, but usually taste nicer! But I also like food with chocolate in it. Shortly after seeing this news item I went to Tesco for the weekly shop – great they have some Value plain chocolate digestives I thought! Then I thought, oh no, it’s not traffik-free chocolate. In fact there are far fewer fair trade chocolate products. In the end I had to buy biscuits without any chocolate in them. I can tell you that they’re getting eaten a lot slower. But sometimes we need to do something, no matter how simple or small it is, in the hope that this one day may make a difference. If I don’t, what will I be able to say to my Lord – and the child slave’s Lord too.

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Broken tooth

March 27, 2007

Last week when eating breakfast I felt a twinge of protest from a tooth as I crunched on a hard bit of cereal. Shortly afterwards I crunched on something even harder – it was about a quarter of one of my teeth which had broken off, leaving a rather exposed bit of ‘inner tooth’ (I think dentine is the technical name)!

Fortunately the fracture hadn’t gone through to the root so I wasn’t in pain, but I was bit unnerved by a large section of missing tooth in my mouth, and thought I’d better go to a dentist soon. Only one problem, however. We haven’t registered with a dentist here in Gloucester. We were looking to find a health service dentist who wouldn’t charge too much, as money is not an overabundant commodity when you’re studying at a mission college. However these are few and far between and we haven’t yet found one taking on new patients.

Never mind, I thought, there’s a phoneline for emergency treatment for patients who don’t have a dentist. After an hour of trying, I got through – and was told that unless I was in severe pain I’d have to go on the waiting list – 10 months! Not so sure that was going to be much use. After lots of frantic effort I did finally manage to find a dentisit in a nearby village who had an available appointment and was willing to see me, even though I wasn’t registered with them. He was able to fix the broken tooth for a not-too-exhorbitant fee. I now have a pin in my tooth, surrounded by filling. However I’m still a bit anxious about really ‘testing’ it too hard – at least until we’re properly registered with a dentist …

This is not the only example I have of not quite getting round to something until it was almost too late. A few years ago I had got a bit lax at making backups of our documents, Emails etc on our computer. After all it was a very good PC and never went wrong. At least until it did, and the computer was unable to read the hard drive. After multiple attempts it did at last start up, and I managed to get the disk spinning again. I didn’t switch off the PC until everything was burned onto CD. That hard drive never worked again, and I only just rescued the data in time.

Often we (or at least I) don’t get round to important things as there’s always something more urgent to do. Only when the emergency happens do we realise that the important is more important than the urgent. And perhaps one day we won’t be able to do it just in time.

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Why is my life so boring?

March 17, 2007

Looking through the search strings which have brought people to this blog, I noticed one question – why is my life so boring? I don’t know why my blog got listed from this search – hopefully it’s not the search engine’s judgment on the content …

But actually quite often life does seem rather mundane. At the moment it’s largely comprised of a series of essays which always need some work, combined with rocking a baby to sleep, playing with baby, eating, sleeping, the occasional weekend away, shopping at Tescos, chatting to my wife. Nothing particularly earth shattering. Talking with other friends about how things are going, we all seemed to feel much the same at the moment – it’s just carrying on.

So what stops life from being ‘so boring’. What do you think?

I’m no expert on the ‘exciting life’ – but I might as well give some thoughts on the matter having raised it. I’ve certainly had plenty of interesting things happening from time to time – going to Spain for 6 weeks recently, the arrival of our baby last year, etc. And I enjoy our holidays when they come round. But I don’t think that an exciting life consists of having more and more of these ‘exciting’ and ‘fun’ activities. When I used to have long student holidays (those were the days!) I was pretty bored after a couple of weeks, and longing to do something else instead. I think variety can help, but still I don’t think that’s the whole secret of of an interesting life.

In most of what we do in life there are elements of interest, beauty and fun as well as elements that are boring and hard work. I may not enjoy writing essays, but I do enjoy the reading that leads up to them. Long car journeys are pretty boring, but you can see some beautiful scenery out of the window (usually). I think I need to learn ‘contentment’ more – to see what is interesting, fun and good in the everyday things of life, and enjoy them. We have to realise that God has given good things even in the mundane parts of life, and I think we will always be somewhat bored until we learn to open our eyes.

Posted in Everyday Life | 2 Comments »

Mooschrooms

March 8, 2007

Here’s another photo from our time in Spain. This is another of my favourites, but for different reasons. It was taken outside a cafe in the square by the cathedral in Valencia.

English spelling is difficult, and not only do I admire the bar’s owners for providing a full English breakfast, but they almost get the spelling entirely right.

Mushrooms

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Migration

March 1, 2007

Just before leaving for Spain I watched an article on the BBC news describing the perilous 1000 mile sea journey that many Senegalese people were making, aiming to reach the Canary islands with the hope of a new life in Spain. The article made quite an impact on me. On one hand, you couldn’t help be angry at the exploitation of desperate people, with gangs demanding exhorbitant fees for smuggling them across the ocean in a way that would mean the death of many at sea. But also I was quite moved by the testimony of some who had taken, or were about to take, such a journey. They did not want to leave their country or family members but felt that they had ‘no other choice’.

When we were in Spain, we were in reality immigrants ourselves for 6 weeks, and this experience gave me an even greater sense of admiration for these ‘illegal immigrants’. Despite the fact that both the UK and Spain are developed European countries, and hence fairly similar, and even though I spoke a reasonable level of Spanish I was quite culture shocked for the first week there. Everything was just a bit different and all the familiarity of knowing how to do every little thing in your own country is suddenly stripped away. And I found it really frustrating just not quite being able to communicate what I wanted to, or understand enough of what people were saying to me. This shock must be far greater if you speak nothing of the language, come from a far more distinct culture and are not about to go home again in 6 weeks. It just made me realise how desperate the poverty of people must be that they are willing to face potential death, family separation, and all this for just the hope of something better somewhere else in a strange land.

The whole issue of migration is a difficult one. No a country cannot practically open its borders to everybody who may wish to enter it. So while there is more concern for those refugees who are fleeing for their lives, there is often little sympathy for the economic migrants. While this is understandable, I don’t think it’s right. It doesn’t seem likely to me that the decision to move to a new country in search of work is one that will made lightly, easily or at little personal cost for anyone. While we do need to find solutions to the problems of migration I think we’d be better off looking at ways of solving the dreadful poverty that pushes people to leave their own, friendly lands, rather than just trying to find ways of stopping them coming in, or getting rid of them once they’ve arrived.

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Onda

February 24, 2007

Well I’m back from my six weeks college placement in Onda, Spain. We had a great time and I’ve got lots to say. But for now I’ll just post a portion of one of my favourite photos of Onda. Onda is a thriving and growing industrial town, but it has plenty of history and a lovely old castle up the hill overlooking Onda. This is lit up at night, and is well worth seeing – below. It’s a bit hard to get a view without street lights, other buildings etc in the way, but this is the best I could manage. It also goes to show that if you don’t have a tripod, a baby pushchair can serve the job, if not quite as well, at least satisfactorily!

The caste at Onda, Spain, lit up at night.

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Snow!

January 31, 2007

I´m currently ín Spain for a college placement. I don´t have much internet access which is why I´ve not written anything here for a while. Sorry about this, but there´ll be plenty to write about when I get back shortly!!

Anyway for now, I´d just like to talk about snow. My memories of my childhood are of heavy winters with foot deep snowfalls, making hundreds of snowmen, snowfights behind walls made of snow, sledging downhill, our cat sinking up to its neck in the snow etc. It may be just that my memories are exaggerating things, but at least since I´ve moved to live further South in England, these things have become something of the past. At most we get one or two snowfalls, with only 1 or 2 cm of snow at best, and it only lasts a few hours!

Spain isn´t the place I´d expect to come to be reminded about snow – being a LOT further South and hence you´d expect milder. And indeed where I am on the mediterranean coast snow falls about once every 10 years, and we enjoyed 24 degrees C in the daytime a week ago! However, most of the Spanish TV news has been about the heavy snowfalls in many of the other parts of Spain, with drifts over head height and several feet of thick snow not seeming that unusual.

I think the snow here is particularly heavy this year, and many have been suffering in the severe weather. But it´s just funny how your childhood memories can be revived in the unlikeliest of places.

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Christmas presence

December 28, 2006

I’m currently enjoying a nice relaxing Christmas vacation – in fact, so relaxing that I haven’t written any new blog posts for a while:-) This will only be a short one too. The holiday has been great so far, with the usual mix of a relaxing time, nice food and not too many urgent tasks to worry about. I also had a good number of very nice presents.

However, looking back on the holiday so far, the thing that stands out most has been a number of relaxing walks with my wife, 7 month old baby, and other relatives. These weren’t in particularly outstanding places, and the weather was actually pretty cold! However they gave a chance just to spend time with and talk to those whom I was walking with, making them the highlight of these and many other holidays. Which just goes to show that perhaps the best Christmas present is Christmas presence.

Posted in Christmas, Everyday Life | 1 Comment »

Communication at Christmas

December 15, 2006

Communication is important. That’s not to say that I’m very good at it – but over the last few months, as we’ve desperately tried to get in touch with various people with limited success, it’s been brought home to me how frustrating it is when communication is one sided. When someone communicates you know that they’re interested in you, they’ve heard what you say, and your relationship with them can grow.

So what’s this to do with Christmas? Well, I’ve finally finished the last of my college work for term, so can start to think about that other major task for this time of year – Christmas cards! Yes, I know it’s probably too late already and so they won’t all arrive until after New Year’s day, but that’s quite normal for me… Actually, we probably won’t write many cards this year, but do intend to write a general letter with our family news, and Christmas greetings, and send that to friends that we haven’t seen much recently.

But I know that some people hate these general ‘Chrismas’ letters. It is nice to get a personal handwritten note, but if I had to write a personal letter to everyone I want to communicate with, they definitely wouldn’t get it until New Year. 2008. I actually like the general letters – we got two today, and I enjoyed reading them both. But is this just me? Well I thought it was time for a poll to find out. Would you rather receive just a Christmas card, only a personal letter, or do you like general letters too? Please vote in the poll in the sidebar, then I’ll find out – not that it will affect what we do this year at least …

Posted in Christmas, Everyday Life | 2 Comments »

Christmas shopping

December 6, 2006

Yes December is here – which means every shop has long been decked out with their Christmas paraphernalia and is repeatedly playing the two Christmas CDs it possesses. And almost everything that the shop is selling has artificial snow on it.

You can probably tell already that I’m not the world’s greatest fan of shopping (unless it’s for something technological, when I could browse for hours), and so Christmas shopping isn’t going to be my favourite pastime. About the only time I really enjoyed Christmas shopping was many years ago when we used to be given half a day off by school to do ours! (Or did I dream this – I can’t imagine schools giving half days off for Christmas shopping now! Anyone else have the same experience?) Fortunately, I’m busy enough with work that I have plenty of excuse to avoid all trips to the shops for at least the next week and a half.

However, Christmas shopping presents me with a dilemma. On one hand, I’m all in favour of generousity. Giving someone a gift for Christmas, particularly a well thought out one, is one of the easier ways in British culture to show your appreciation and love for them. It’s nice to have the opportunity to be generous and give.

But on the other hand, there are not that many things that I really need, and so many of the presents given to us can in reality be just a waste of someone’s money, and a waste of this world’s resources. And when we get lots of them they just clutter up our lives, and cause us a headache in trying to find somewhere to put them. One option is to give money, which you can put together to buy something useful that you really want – but it’s a bit boring.

So what’s the solution? Well one option is to buy a goat! (See www.farmfriends.org.uk or http://shop.christianaid.org.uk/icat/farming for example, if this seems crazy to you) – you help someone who really needs a present, don’t clutter up your house, and you can also treasure a photo / model of your goat for the rest of your life!

Any other thoughts?

Posted in Christmas, Everyday Life | 3 Comments »

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