Since I’ve returned from the U.K. I’ve been handing out Reverse Trick-or-Treat kits to my school. I’ve handed out almost 500 kits while telling parents and kids about Fair Trade. I made a powerpoint presentation about my trip and what I learned and presented it to my class. My class was shocked at how people were treated in the world, and they asked questions like what can we do to help or can we all try to write letters to eliminate child slavery? They all really wanted to help, I could tell because of the conversations they were having. One of my classmates thought we should all go to Africa and try to help the people by passing laws about slavery. When I saw the way my classmates responded to this topic I knew I would be passing this topic around really fast.

I set up a booth to sell mini fair trade chocolates for people to hand out for Halloween, and after a couple of days five kids came over to help me. This is not for a profit or for fundraising, it’s just to raise awareness and get people eating tasty fair trade chocolate. It was really cool, because I was selling the chocolate, my friend and his brother were passing out Reverse trick or treating packs, and my other friend and his two siblings ran down to the other building and started to sell and hand out trick or treat kits. I did this for a week and sold 150 packages of chocolate which was 4,500 pieces!  I raised so much awareness.

On Friday I went up to the high school and set up my booth there, well first I can say I sold ten bags of chocolate, and can also say that when students got the trick or treating kits they read each information card then ate the chocolate, which was okay with me because they all said stuff like “I’ll be sure to buy fair trade from now on”. I’ve raised a lot of awareness and what do I plan to do next?  I’m going to try to show a screening of the Black Gold movie, if I can get everyone to know about this we can all try to get Hershey fair trade by sending then non stop cards, and emailing them. It might take a while, but everything is worth it when fair trade is on the line.

The more I sell Equal Exchange Mini Fair Trade chocolates at school, the more this question comes up. What kind of candy should you buy that is fair trade? You should take a look at this link to find out brands of slave-free chocolate and where you can buy it.  There is Equal Exchange, Dagoba, there is Endangered Species  and soooo many more. Also you can get fair trade products at Whole foods market, and some at Trader Joes. Like I said in the beginning, look for the labels!

Selling Chocolate and Raising Awareness With My Little Brother

My Friend Will Helping Out! Thanks Will!!

A big portion of my school knows about fair trade now! To keep awareness going, I’m selling FAIR TRADE chocolate at my school just in time for Halloween. My goal is to sell out 80 POUNDS of chocolate (6200 pieces)! So far I have sold 2250 pieces in TWO days! I’m so happy I can raise awareness this fast, thats almost 80 families who know about fair trade. I’m giving out Reverse trick or treating kits, and people love them. Well Reverse trick or treat is where when you get a piece of candy you handa card with piece of chocolate on it and the card is information about fair trade. I’m handing out 600 reverse trick-or-treat cards with chocolate at my school too. If we hand out all 600 cards to 600 houses on Halloween that’s 600 more families on my side. Keeping this up can get a lot of people on the side of fair trade, getting all of my friends to keep this up will get the whole world knowing about fair trade!

Check out Equal Exchange to order Halloween chocolate too!

http://shop.equalexchange.com/category.aspx?categoryID=21

How to spot fair trade products: wpri.com

Check out this news show about how to spot fair trade.

After the wonderful school experience, Christina picked my mum and I up because we had to pick up Ruby from school. We got Ruby at her little school house that was over 150 years old! We went straight to the Longden house which was over 250 years old and used to be a workshop for people to make yarn on looms. After a while, Ian and Ruby’s little brother Gregory came home. Greg, Ruby, and I played for a while before having dinner of fish and chips and English sausage.

Ian and I had a meeting about fair trade. First of all, he told me, the true definition of fair trade is, “A financial relationship between producers, sellers, and consumers based on the principle of equity within exchange of goods.” That means that fair trade is like going to the grocery store and buy something which is a relationship between producers and consumers, only it’s done fairly so that what consumers buy goes to the farmers equally.  Fair trade is a good thing because it helps the farmers live a much better life. 

There is a logo used on fair trade items too. This costs $3000 U.S. dollars for farmers in developing countries to use. That’s a lot of money! That’s ridiculous to me because it’s still hard for people to make a fair amount of money if they have to pay that much money to use the logo.  But even in fair trade there are things that are not fair. It still helps to buy fair trade things though, but there are things that could work better in the fair trade market too.

The Lorna Young Foundation got its name from the first person to put fair trade items in stores, Lorna Young. She did in the U.K. what I want to do in the U.S. The LYF named it after Lorna Young after she died. Ian told me The LYF supports small farmers in developing countries to add value as they grow. They provide access to specialist business and market education and mentoring.

And get this, Ian also told me that 2.5 billion cups of coffee are consumed a day and 25 million people are dependent for it. The global tea market has 3.7 billion kg of tea all the time. The UK tea market is a wowing 135m kg.

Ian said he would give me more information as I ask for it. Ruby, Greg, and I played chase some more. I had them squealing and laughing which was really fun! Playing with them reminded me of my little brother, Cary, and it made me miss him. After a while we had to go to bed. I had a HUGE day and I was very tired so it was nice to sleep.

(view from the Longden front yard)

Ruby and Greg

It took us a while to get to our school but Olivia and I made it in time for class to start. After a quick orientation of what the day was going to be like, we got to our first class which was on computer safety. We looked at a slide show about never meeting in person with someone we meet on the Internet, don’t give away personal information on the Internet, and always use a screen name instead of our real name. We also learned how to block our accounts on Facebook so just our friends could see them. We then took a small quiz. The class was pretty cool, but I knew most of the things we were learning about.

We had a quick break which Olivia and I spent talking about the school and people that go there. We went in to our English class where they were studying about Shakespeare’s  Romeo and Juliet. We did an activity where we had the Romeo and Juliet prolouge cut up in to strips and we had to rearrange the strips in the right order. I really liked this class and learning about Shakespeare. I also liked reading the story.

After a long way to walk after English I went to PE with the boys to play Rugby! I had to change in the boy’s locker room which was in gym that was huge! It had a lot of lines on the floor and was fun to run around in. All of the kids split up in to groups and we did Rugby practice. We had to run and pass the ball, only it’s different than throwing a football so it was pretty hard. The ball is big and we have to throw it backward and always underhand like you are bowling. I caught on by the end of PE I wish I could have had more practice and play time!

After gym I was closed in by kids, because I was American. They wanted to know if I met any famous people, or where I was from, or how old I was, or if I would give them a high five, it was like I was the famous person.  They kept asking me to ‘talk’, ‘say something’, ‘let me hear your accent’.  It was funny! Unfortunately Olivia felt sick, she had a sore throat the night before so we had to leave a little early to go home. I hope she’s feeling better!

It was a really fun experience at a school very different from my own. 

(See school below)

Well todays the day…I have to leave London, on the bright side we are going to Huddersfield. We rushed through London with our 100 pounds of luggage, result HEAVY! 

After getting comfortable on the train ride, we met a cool man. He said he met the Beatles, and was interested in the music industry. I can’t believe he really met the Beatles! He asked me for my autograph because he heard me play guitar and thought I might be “famous” one day, funny man.

Ian Longden picked us up from the train station and we went to a meeting about fair trade! He told me that if store owners carry 3 items that are fair trade, they can call themselves fair trade stores. Here, Nestle made Kit-Kat fair trade so if store owners carry that along with two other fair trade items, they can say they are fair trade. Because all stores carry Kit-Kat or the other two or three products Nestle has called fair trade, the markets become a little lazy about making the companies carry other fair trade chocolate or coffee or tea or whatever.

We stayed the night with Laura who works for the Lorna Young Foundation, and her daughter Olivia. I will shadow Olivia for a day at her school. We got to the house and climbed up a huge hill, onto these really cool rocks, they were like a bunch of mini Stonehedges. We watched videos on line, then told ghost stories in her room. It was really cool, we had pizza and got ready for the upcoming day at her school.

So on Sunday night I went to the screening of “When China met Africa” by Marc and Nick Francis. The movie overall was very good, it had great facts and footage. The Francis brothers directed another film called “Black Gold”, which is about fair trade. I thought they would be good to ask questions. Christina Longden, the Lorna Young Foundation Director, said, “Anyone who knows anything about fair trade, knows about the film “Black Gold”. Anyway, after the eye opening movie Marc and Nick were talking and answering questions from the audience. Marc and Nick invited us to an after party before we flew out here so we were super excited.

We were VERY lost on the way to the party and it turned out I was too young to be in the pub but I got in anyway. We found Nick and to give me advice as a young advocate of fair trade. He said I should focus on which area of fair trade I want to work in, consumers, actual companies, high people (celebrities) etc. Right now I’m choosing to focus on raising awareness with consumers. I know I will use this information for my projects of fair trade later on.

Today I went to breakfast and, the menu said, “All of our coffee is fairtrade”.  After breakfast we went to Parliament Square. The Big Ben was amazing, but there were protesters everywhere! There must have been 1,000 police officers, the protesters were saying  that we should  stop the war in Afghanistan. Hey you know what, these protesters are fighting for what they want, like what I’m trying to do, I find this stuff inspiring.

There were so many people that we had to move along, so I had to say good bye to the amazing square. We kept on moving but the protesting never got better, more police, more people. I think every two police covered up 1 ft. of space. We saw one of the tower guards on his horse that was pretty cool. Finally we arrived at Trafalgar square, it was very amazing with it’s water fountains, and the great museum behind it. But as well as the other places it was packed with thousands of protesters. They had piles of signs to hold up so I grabbed one and held it up with them.  Not that  this blog is about war but I don’t like war either mostly because it costs a lot of lives and money and no one will ever end up being right.

A guy was drawing all the flags on the sidewalk. People were putting money on their flags and I put a few pounds on the USA flag.

Today we took the double decker bus around London. It was cool! We were on the top level and could see everything. We found a row of stores that were all guitar shops and then found a record store that was better than what we saw in Camden. We bought so many records we were dripping with them!

After resting at the hotel for a while, we went to see “Wicked”.  But first we had sushi at a place called “Yo Sushi” that is in a giant train station. The sushi comes to you on a belt that moves different sushi plates around the restaurant and you just grab the ones you want. It was so fun and yummy! “Wicked” was really amazing. The stage had a giant robot dragon above it that moved like it was real. The singing and acting really inspired me to come back and sing my best in the choir!

After the best show ever we walked around the train station and guess what was being sold there….? FAIR TRADE stuff!!! I couldn’t believe this it was like a dream come true. Lots of food places using fair trade chocolate and coffee.  Last night was incredible, and I hope fair trade things keep popping up everywhere because then we will succeed!

If you have any pictures of Fair Trade things you are purchasing post a picture too!

I made it through the uncomfortable plane ride. Let me make it simple. Bad, Sick Feeling, Headache, Dark, Sneezes, and snores. I got one hour of sleep last night, but took a 15 minute nap in the morning so I was refreshed.

Enough talk about the plane lets talk about…………LONDON!!!!!! At last I made it to my dream come true. After going through all of the changing all of our U.S. dollars in to pounds we were ready for breakfast. When I ordered a sausage egg sandwich I didn’t expect it to be big or anything, but it was huge! I was excited because this was my first breakfast in England. After a huge breakfast we walked around and decided to go to the Camden market, Camden market is a place where people go to buy clothes and stuff that you can only find at the Camden market. There is a huge collection of music items and I knew I had to get something for my family and maybe something for myself.

Anyway, my mom and I saw a store that looked like if it could talk it would say “hello people rock on”! We went in and a guy had a blue mohawk that went up to the roof! After a while I found a really cool Iron Maiden shirt. I went up to pay for it and the owner asked, “Have you seen the bottom floor”? I said, “No.”

Turned out the whole bottom floor was filled with leather jackets. My mom had said I could buy a jacket when we were in London, so I knew this would be the spot. I couldn’t believe my eyes when the owner said try this one on and it fit. Now I knew this jacket would be a lot of British Pounds so I thought for sure I wouldn’t get it. We talked about the price with the owner and he wanted a LOT of money. After thinking it through my mom and I decided not to get the jacket. But then just as we are about to walk out the door the owner says “Wait!” Camden market is all about bargaining, which I had no idea we could do. After he and my mom talked about a good price she ended up buying the jacket. It’s the best jacket ever! And best of all for dessert tonight I had FAIR TRADE chocolate at the store corner, Fair trade rocks!!