Monday, July 10, 2006

as it should be.

it's been nearly two weeks since my life was stable (i.e. living in my own apartment and receiving a regular paycheck for my regular hours at the 4-year-old job). in the past 12 days, i've made my home at 4 different houses belonging to friends who have graciously allowed me to camp out for a bit in their living rooms.

the reality of all that is temporary is seeping into my bones. anything and everything that won't go with us when we die seems awkwardly heavy and annoyingly frustrating to bear.

i have luggage. three bags that i've filled with t-shirts and shoes and shorts and skirts. i have a hair dryer and a curling iron for those days when i want to feel as though i can look respectable if i want to be. i have two books - hurt: inside the world of today's teenagers and the devil in the white city. i have a notebook and two hats. i have shampoo, soap, a razor, and face wash. i have contact solution and a toothbrush and - as it happens - two different deoderants (in case one's not doing the trick?).

all of it is too much. i think this because i have been wearing my swimsuit all day. i put it on this morning in hopes that my brother-in-law could drop me off at jon's apartment's pool after i dropped off jon's car at the shop. it was about 62 degrees this morning, so i had to forego it. i did find time to lay out in the strip of grass outside chris and sarah's apartment building though. i love swimsuits. i really could live in mine. i don't want to worry about clothes anymore. or any other stuff in my suitcases.

yep, all of it is too much. even all my thoughts seem to be too much. or not enough. i can't figure out where one leads to the next.

erin, laura, and i attended the midwest social forum this past weekend. i attended seminars on immigration, faith-based organizing, spoken word for youth expression, and fair trade. my mind began to explode at the seams, so i skipped the rest of the seminars to reflect.

we learned that fair trade cofee represents only 1% of world coffee consumption, that Starbucks is the largest retailer of fair trade yet their fair trade sales only account for a percent or two of their total profits. why is it necessary to buy fair trade? it's FAIR.

FAIR. i look at that word and hear one of the participants words echo in my mind: "should a label on a product have to say 'fair trade certified'? does that not imply that everything else is unfair? would you buy a product that says 'this product will return unfair wages to workers who are overworked already?"

we are a messed up world. we have immigration problems. haliburton just signed a contract with our government to receive $400 million to build prisons on our southern border. we've already spent $30 billion on border patrol. we screwed over workers in Mexico and Central America when Clinton signed us up for NAFTA. after taking their jobs from them, we want to punish them when they try to find a life in the States that stole their jobs from them in the first place? we want to spend over $30 billion to punish? we're already the country that spends the most on prisons of any place. what is wrong with us?

undocumented immigrants in our country have paid as much as $420 billion in Social Security which they will never see. what's worse yet is that 5,000 people have died in the desert due to border militarization in the past 12 years. that's more than one person every day. one human being. one sister or brother or mother or father or daughter or son.

for as much as i love god, and for as confident as i am in his goodness and his promise of salvation from our fallen world, all of this is baggage that drags us down to the earth. no experience of god, no corporate worship moment, no prayer circle or scripture reading lasts long enough to steal our attention from the weight of the world, this awkward baggage that no one person can carry on their own, that no person SHOULD have to carry on their own.

it's all temporary, i know. someday we'll all die. and where i lived for a month without a home and how much money that migrant farm worker in mexico didn't make because i wanted to buy my coffee cheap or how awful those circumstances were for the children in the ivory coast being subjected to law-violating practices by the nestle company, all of that will end someday. we'll all pass through here. it's temporary.

and yet, god lets us live here. he asks us to love him, to love our neighbors, to care about the earth he created, to act justly, to serve each other, to watch for him.

how do i work here as unto the lord and still ask him to come quickly and save us all? i think this living is business is tricky. to be living still when your friends die, or your spouse dies, or your heart is broken, or you can't make ends meet, or you someday realize your life has been easy because you've unknowingly stood on the backs of the poor who've worked the lowest jobs for the lowest pay so you could have the t-shirt you wanted or the nikes you love ... man. lord, help me love you, love my friends, and love my neighbors above myself. help me to pursue justice, to serve others. help me to fight for the oppressed and speak up for those who find no voice. help me to watch for you. and i am still eagerly anticipating your return when you'll make everything as it should be.

5 Comments:

At 6:47 AM, Blogger Laura said...

.....amen

 
At 8:46 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I agree with you, Mary, that buying fair trade certified products is a great way to make a direct positive impact in somone's life. Fair trade really does help! I think, though, that the issues of fair trade certification are more complicated than they seem. If I remember correctly, for a coffee farm to be certified fair trade, it needs to be a democratically owned co-op farm. So that means that a small single family owned farm cannot be certified fair trade. What would be really great would be if all companies were totally ethical and paid fair prices to all farmers, regardless of their certification status. I think that fair trade certification is a great solution for farmers who are not getting paid fairly, but not the only solution. That being said, it's hard to know who those ethical companies are, so it's great to have certification programs to help consumers who definitely want to help change the world, one cup of coffee at a time.

 
At 10:40 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

something that's been rolling around in my head these days. and you said it so perfectly. would love to hear more of what you learned at the conference. thanks for those thoughts :)

miss you!
-kph

 
At 11:55 AM, Blogger Mary said...

betsy, great comment. i actually did some research and came up with the following:

What are the Fairtrade Labeling Organizations criteria for producers?

A: FLO maintains a Coffee Producers Registry that is open to associations of small farmers who meet several criteria that can be summed up in the following way. They have to be poor; only small farmers who are not dependent on hired labor, not plantations, are represented. And they have to be democratically organized as small farmer associations that are independent and transparent. Representatives from FLO annually inspect Fair Trade farms in producing countries.

The exact FLO criteria for Producers are the following:

1. the majority of the members of the organization are small scale producers of coffee. By small producers are understood those that are not structurally dependent on hired labor, managing their farm mainly with their own and their family's labor-force;

2. the organization is independent and democratically controlled by its members. This means that the members of the organizations participate in the decision-making process which determines the general strategy of their organization, including decisions related to the destiny of the additional resources which result from operations in the framework of this agreement;

3. administrative transparency and effective control by the members and its Board over the management is secured, minimizing the risk of fraud and offering members the necessary instruments to be able to act adequately in case of fraud;

4. the philosophy motivating the organization is based on the concept and practice of solidarity;

5. no form of political, racial, religious or sexual discrimination is practiced;

6. the organization is statutarily open to new members;

7. the organization is politically independent, and there are sufficient guarantees that the organization will not become the instrument of any political party or interest;

8. the organization shares with the FLO-International and with the other organizations inscribed in the Producers' Register the following principles and general objectives:

* integral economic development, concentrating on improvement of production techniques and diversification of the production, in order to diminish dependency on one single product as a cash crop;

* integral organizational development, improving the managerial and administrative capacity of the actual and future leadership of the organization and ensuring full participation of the members in the definition of strategies and the use of extra income resulting from fair trade;

* integral social development, for instance through health care and educational programs, improvement of housing and water supply, thus creating better living conditions for the members and their families and the communities they live in;

* sustainable development strategies, applying production techniques which respect the specific ecosystems and contribute to the conservation and a sustainable use of natural resources, in order to avoid as much as possible - or even totally - the use of chemical inputs;

* integral human participation, offering especially women the opportunity to play a more active role in the development process and in the decision making process and management of the organization;

* improvement of the quality of the products as a strategic requirement for the small producers to defend themselves on both the Fair Trade Market and the regular market.

Logically, it is necessary that the quality of the coffee offered for exportation complies with the minimum quality standards as required by the different markets, and the organization must count with the management capacity to effectively export the coffee and act as a reliable commercial partner.

There are no criteria made for farm practices that the Fair Trade farmers must follow, even though Fair Trade standards explicitly support the development of organic agriculture and environmental protection. At the Fair Trade Producers' Assembly in June 1997, the producer groups themselves proposed a set of environmental standards. These standards included the use of leguminous trees, cultivation of timber species on the coffee farm, and windbreaks. These producer-derived indicators emphasize the awareness of "shade" as a beneficial farm practice, decreasing the likelihood that farmers will transfer to "sun" grown coffee as they increase their profits.

This is all from http://www.globalexchange.org/campaigns/fairtrade/coffee/faq.html

 
At 3:14 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I love this thought Mar, very much on my heart as well...

:) Abs

 

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