Believing in Fair Trade

From the time I was first introduced to fair trade I thought it was a good idea.  I first learned of the concept when I was living in Northern Ireland in 1999.  Derry, where I was living, became a “Fair Trade Town”.  A special event was held at City Hall and I attended.  There I got to sample fair trade tea, chocolate, and coffee and I heard a brief presentation on what fair trade is all about.  The mix of social mission and business was appealing.  That event had a big impact on me.  It happened right about the same time I needed to choose a topic for my Master’s Thesis.  With a bit of effort in convincing my professors it was a suitable topic, fair trade became the subject of my Thesis.  The research I did in the 6 months or so it took me to complete my paper made me a believer that fair trade was effectively and efficiently providing much needed employment and resources to families and communities in developing countries.  It’s a long story that I won’t go into here but it was through my research that I became introduced to Global Gifts where I am now employed.

Senora Toshinada, Maruca, and Joel swap stories about clients over lunch. 

Though my belief in fair trade has remained strong, it is always nice when I have it reaffirmed.  My recent experience with Manos Amigas has done just that.  During the recent capacity building training that Manos Amigas hosted for their artisan partners, I had a chance to speak with several different people about their work and their thoughts on fair trade.   For lunch one day we all went to a nearby restaurant in Lima.  Alison and I sat with 3 artisans during the meal.  When talking about their business, all three shared stories of clients who treated them badly.  For example, Joel spoke about a woman who bought from them who was very friendly in their initial interactions.  She would ask about his family and about his mother who was ill.  But then when he went to her shop to deliver the order, she would barely acknowledge him and treated him rudely.  In contrast, Manos Amigas helped the family buy medication for his mother when she was near the end of her life.  He was also grateful that Manos Amigas loaned the family money that was later forgiven for a coffin when his mother died.  This sort of giving and assistance is not always a part of fair trade.  But the respect and appreciation for producers it represents is very much a part of fair trade.

Yannina, Director of Manos Amigas, with Senora Toshinado

We also heard stories of mistreatment through lack of payment.  In one case, a group was taken advantage of when they worked with a middleman who delivered products for them. But after he delivered the products and received payment, he ran off with the money rather than paying the group what they had earned.  While these types of stories don’t necessarily represent business as usual in the non-fair trade market, I believe they do represent a vulnerability that the artisans have because they are often quite desperate to take whatever opportunity that may lay before them or at least appear to lay before them.

Yannina and Luigi (a buyer from an Italian fair trade organization) walk to visit several artisan workshops in this neighborhood.

But treating producers with basic respect and dignity is just part of the fair trade equation.  Another critcal contrast is the 50% downpayment that is made when an order is placed by a fair trade buyer.  Sometimes orders are quite large involving thousands of individual pieces to be made.  Not only does the 50% downpayment provide needed income for materials and paying workshop employees, it also provides confidence that the buyer won’t walk out on the deal mid-way through without paying.  When I asked how much non-fair trade buyers would pay in advance for an order, the answer came back “not much”, 10-20% or sometimes nothing at all.

Leonidas stands at the entrance of his home and ceramics workshop.  He has been selling to Manos Amigas for 20 years.

Manos Amigas works with around 87 artisan workshops.   Each workshop has a handful of employees which increases or decreases depending on the level of orders they are receiving.  This means several hundred people (nearly 1,000 during peak times) may be receiving employment through Manos Amigas at any given time.  When I have had the opportunity to talk with some of these folks I will often ask, “Is fair trade important to you?  Does it make much of a difference?  Maybe a little bit or not much?”  Over and over again the person I’m speaking with eyes become big and the look on their face is emphatic, “Yes, it is very important!” they respond. 

It moves me to know that I am part of a community of people, a movement, which is impacting lives and setting a just standard of business through fair trade.  Manos Amigas is one fair trade exporter among a dozen or more significantly sized fair trade businesses working in Peru.  Each business represents a community of varying size of folks who are enjoying being part of the fair trade system.  I would estimate that the reach of that impact is felt by several thousand people in the country of Peru although I can only make a guess.  Artisans like Daniel, exporters like Manos Amigas, importers like Ten Thousand Villages and SERRV, and stores like Global Gifts, and the people who buy these beautifully made products are part of a system of business that respects people and the planet, reaches out to those who lack opportunity, and I believe brings people around the world a bit closer together.

Daniel a ceramics artisan, Yannina an exporter, Luigi an importer, and Sam a store manager represent the chain that is involved with fair trade.  Only missing was Alison, the consumer, who was taking the photo.  Later Luigi asked for another photo to be taken with Simon included as the "future of fair trade".  Could Walmart take this picture?  :)

When I consider the significant impact fair trade is having in Peru and then I imagine the multiplied impact of fair trade throughout the world, I can’t help but be proud of the work we are doing at Global Gifts and the work being done within the fair trade movement.  Within this series of thoughtful transactions that represent fair trade business is a place I am happy to be.

One Month with Manos Amigas

We have now completed just over one month volunteering with Manos Amigas.  It has certainly been a busy  time.  It is hard to know where to start writing.

We arrived at Manos Amigas with a lot of unanswered questions.   What type of work would we be doing?  Were the folks who run Manos Amigas really even that excited about our being there?  Was our work appreciated?  Were we going to have opportunities to work with artisans as well as the administrators of the organization?  These questions swirled in our heads during our initial days and even weeks with Manos Amigas.

Our communication with Manos Amigas before we started was more limited than I would have liked.  Yannina who runs the organization is clearly very busy and we wanted to limit our initial email exchanges as much as we could when we were making our plans to come here.  We got the impression she was busy because there was often a delay of several days or more when we sent an email and we knew she was doing a lot of travelling related to some of the tours Manos Amigas organizes.   So we were really taking a bit of a leap of faith in choosing Manos Amigas as our volunteer destination.   Apparently they felt the same way about us.

Even during our initial emails, Yannina let us know they had not had a lot of luck with past volunteers.  Despite our work experience, despite sending detailed resumes, even though we were recommended by a mutual colleague, it felt as if we were accepted as volunteers somewhat reluctantly.   We have recently heard some of the horror stories about past volunteers which helped us better understand their hesitation.  Early on we decided that we had to prove ourselves as capable and helpful. 

Our first task was helping Manos Amigas with their website.  We had noticed before we left the states that their website was no longer up.  We also were no longer receiving responses to emails we sent Yannina and we thought these two issues might be related.  It turned out they were.  It is a long story but it sounds like because of a dispute with their former web designer, they lost their website address and their email addresses.  By the time we arrived at Manos Amigas, their website had been down for over six weeks although they were able to set up new email addresses before then. 

The first day we started work, Yannina asked if we had experience with websites.  Alison and I both had limited experience in website development and upkeep.  Neither one of us are experienced designers but within a matter of a few days, we were able to get a functioning website up and running for them.  For an organization that ships products to some 21 countries and works with 87 artisan workshops, having a functioning website is critical. 



A screenshot of the new website, www.manos-amigas.com.pe

While Alison has continued to make improvements to their website and began developing their product catalog, I shifted my focus to their annual “remate” or clearance sale.  Each year Manos Amigas holds a sale of their old sample items and of items made for shipment but for one reason or another never shipped.  I was put in charge of managing this sale and Alison provided much needed help with this as well.

Manos Amigas has a nice showroom within their office building/warehouse.  It is filled with natural light and is ideal for displaying products.  However in the showroom they have pieces of plywood set on top of stacks of old wooden crates that they use for display tables.  When I arrived, every flat surface was covered with different types of products.  And under these makeshifts display tables were boxes and boxes of old product, often ceramics that were thrown in the boxes at varying levels of care.  And then I was shown the really big boxes that were full of a LOT MORE stuff that had to be stored in another room because they didn’t fit in the show room.  “All of it” I was told should be put out for the remate.  I kept thinking of the Global Gifts staff and how each year it seems like an impossible task to put all the new holiday merchandise out on the floor in addition to stocking up on regular items for that busy time of year.  That experience served me well here.

In addition to displaying all of this product (more on that later) I was to price it.  About 25% of the product had a price on it and another 25% had a code or SKU but no price and the remaining 50% had neither.  If it had a price, great, with some cleaning it was ready to go.  If there was a code but no price, than I needed to take it into another room, and find the item in their database.  Especially for any Global Gifts staff that may be reading this, this database is an excel spreadsheet that literally is broken into about 15 tabs across the bottom and there are probably close to 40,000 to 50,000 SKU’s in the database.  So it is not necessarily a quick thing to find a sku.  For those items that don’t have a SKU it gets more complicated.  If the item didn’t have the SKU, I was to find a picture of it and the picture would be named with the sku.  Then I could look it up in the database.  To find the picture, I was to look through around 80 different artisan folders on the computer, to see which one of them might have made the item and therefore had the picture of the product I was looking for in their folder.  “Not exactly an efficient process” I thought.

After looking up enough product prices I thought I was getting the hang of what the prices would be without looking them up.  That coupled with the fact that I knew these products were really old and they were motivated to get rid of them made me feel comfortable enough to propose that rather than looking up all these prices (which would take forever) maybe I could just assign prices without looking them up.  After suggesting prices for several items to Yannina, she agreed that would be a good way for me to work going forward.  Things went much quicker from there.

Next came putting these products out for display.  When Mario introduced this project to me he took me to the second level of Manos Amigas which is still under construction.  Picture bare concrete floors and walls, piles of boards and scrap lumber, metal pipes and re bar sticking up out of the floor, sawhorses and other tools scattered around.  "Use any of this for display,” he said, pointing to the construction site material.  Old wooden crates, rough wood boards of varying lengths, a metal pole, rusty mattress springs were all up for grabs.  And it was all covered with a thick layer of dust.



An example of what I started working with.



I had fun rummaging through this material to figure out how to create displays from it.  And I enjoyed putting the product out and making it look the best I could.  It was interesting to open up the numerous old boxes to see what might be inside.  What wasn’t fun was finding many of the boxes were crawling with silverfish or discovering painted gourds full of sawdust from termites or other insects.  Every now and then my hands became so black handling product that I needed to wash them before going on.

A crate with a board on top creates nice levels for a sea of miniatures.

Another photo from the remate



This display of musical instruments was nearly bought out in the first two days :)



The sale has been going on now for a couple of weeks and it seems like it is off to a good start.  People come to shop every now and then.  Some days no one comes.  Mostly just friends of Yannina’s mom come and shop.  It’s a good thing Yannna’s mom has lots of friends.  At one moment there were 5 women all wanting to check out at once and no one seemed to get the concept of a line.  In addition the women were all giving me special instructions (in Spanish) and for a while it got pretty crazy.  “I thought I was going to miss the Christmas rush this year” is what kept going through my head.



A broader view



More is happening but this post is already long so I’ll include more in another post.  We are now feeling like our work is appreciated and we are happy with our choice of volunteering with Manos Amigas.  Tomorrow artisans begin arriving for a capacity building training Manos Amigas is holding.  I’m doing a presentation on what makes a great selling product.  I’ll let you know how it goes.

A Visit with Maurelio Huaraca

Recently the board of Ten Thousand Villages traveled to Peru to visit some of the artisans that make the products that they sell.  Yannina Meza, Director of Manos Amigas, coordinated their visit and Alison, Simon and I were fortunate to be able to tag along.  One artisan we met was Maurelio Huaraca.

Maurelio Huaraca

We drove to the town of Lurin, just outside of Lima, to visit the ceramics workshop of Maurelio Huaraca.  Maurelio moved to Lima when he was 14 to get away from the terrorism that plagued much of the Peruvian countryside at that time.  Maurelio lives in a modest home  with his family and makes ceramic figures using traditional Peruvian techniques. 

The technique was originally used for making utilitarian pieces but he has adapted it for making decorative pieces for export. He learned the trade from his father as he played in his father’s workshop as a child.  The figures which most frequently are nativity scenes are a combination of molded and hand formed clay.  Maurelio makes the molds by hand and the molded part serves as the base of his pieces.  He then hand forms pieces such as a head, arms, and so on and attaches them to the molded base. He uses natural colors and traditional glazes for his pieces.

(Maurelio formed this piece off one of the molds pictured in about 30 seconds as we watched)

His bestselling item is the storyteller.  He has sold approximately 2,000 of these pieces a year for the past 10 years.  Sales of all his items have decreased in recent years.  He has definitely been impacted by the world recession.  He is one of 5 brothers and they all do this type of work.  Depending on the level of orders he has, he is able to hire more people to work with him. When he doesn’t have enough orders, he has to find different work to make ends meet. 



(Maurelio holds up his best selling piece.  He describes the woman as reading the Bible to children)



Manos Amigas and other fair trade export organizations help Maurelio sell his work in the US and other export markets.  Through Manos Amigas, Maurelio has been selling his pieces to Ten Thousand Villages for 18 years.



(Maurelio holding a nativity scene purchased by Ten Thousand Villages and sold at Global Gifts.)



(Maurelio's daughter at the entrance to their home just beyond the workshop.)



(Maurelio holding a piece I purchased)

Simon Makes Friends

I am amazed at the ease at which Simon makes friends. With his blond hair he certainly stands out.  And his smile seems to win folks over with no trouble at all.

I appreciate the time he stopped to chat with an elderly gentleman in a wheelchair at the airport and I was impressed when a complete stranger recently handed over her dog so he could walk it. 

It was great to hear from Alison how he met a boy close to his age at the playground and they had a good time playing together. 

 But recently at the Lima airport, Simon found a particularly good friend.  He saw a little girl, about his age and ran up to her and stared (his typical approach).  Soon they were crawling on the ground and giggling together. 

But heads did turn when the little girl took Simon with both hands and kissed him on the mouth - - repeatedly.  Simon didn’t seem to mind a bit.  In fact, afterwards he ran in circles laughing. 

Speaking Spanish with the Japanese

I’m not proud of it but I do carry some stereotypes.  Based on very limited experience (the foundation of stereotype) my impression of the Japanese has been of tourists who take A LOT of pictures.  Doesn’t matter really what it is, they want a picture of it!  On top of that, I get the impression they are really into gadgets.  But that’s just me.  Interestingly, speaking Spanish (although admittedly I’m a total beginner) has helped me see past stereotype.

Our first month in Lima, we stayed with a family that hosted students for the language school.  During our stay we lived with 2 Japanese, 1 Canadian (a French speaker), 1 Swiss, 1 Colombian, 2 Peruvians and we of course brought 3 Americans to the mix.  What struck me about this international brew (among the non-native Spanish speakers) was that as we only communicated in Spanish, it seemed like a neutral territory we all existed and communicated in.  For some reason it helped me focus more on the person rather than on my preconceived notions of national identity.  Whether hearing about what they did that day, their work or the party they went to, hearing it in Spanish helped me get past some of my own stereotypes.  Somehow this shared and neutral language helped me feel like we had that much more in common despite our many differences.

Transaction:  A month of language school offered more insight and learning than simply improvement in my Spanish.

Introduction to Fair Trade in Peru

One of the important reasons I wanted to spend an extended period in Peru was to connect with the artisan and producer side of fair trade.  Global Gifts works with fair trade wholesalers and our relationships with them are valued and important.   But it lacks the personal touch of making connections and really understanding what fair trade is about from the producer standpoint. 

Recently at Manos Amigas I had the opportunity to sit in on a training that SERRV sponsored for several of its artisan partners in South America.  Representatives from 6 fair trade organizations were present.  They were: Vilma Allauca with Camari in Ecuador, Eduardo Velasquez with MCCH in Ecuador, Pamela Diaz with Comparte in Chile, Ruth de la Cruz & Flora Mamani with CIAP in Peru, Emilia Anyosa & Maribel Inga with Bridge of Hope in Peru and Yannina Meza & Mario Rietveld with Manos Amigas in Peru.

I asked SERRV if I could come and sit in on a session and be an observer and they said “sure”.  Observing is pretty much what I did since my Spanish is still very limited and everything was in Spanish.  But still it was interesting to hear and see a presentation that focused on the types of product trends we see at Global Gifts on a regular basis.  For instance,

·         Making things out of recycled or reclaimed materials is “hot”, especially if you can give the items a new look and purpose and there is a surprise factor when the person realizes what it is made from. 

·         Decorative items are popular especially if they are also functional.

·         There was a big focus on jewelry which is no surprise.  It is my understanding that jewelry is biggest sales category in fair trade when you don’t include commodities such as coffee and cocoa.

I asked Maria from SERRV if the representatives attending were designers (the focus of several days of training was on product design).   She said no because most groups can’t afford to pay a designer.  Regardless, I think the training was an important effort to share information about the US and to a lesser degree the European market that the producers might not otherwise have access to.  I know SERRV was also able to receive some feedback about what was and wasn’t especially helpful in terms of resources they offered to one of the groups.  In my mind, investing in training and taking the time for honest communication is what fair trade is about.  It was great to see it in practice.  I hope I get to see some popular new designs that may be a result of this effort.  On a more personal note, I was able to eke out enough Spanish to introduce myself to Pamela of Comparte and let her know that Alison and I were looking forward to coming and visiting them sometime in the coming months - another adventure to look forward to.

9-26-11

Last Sunday Alison and I had our first chance to see Manos Amigas and meet Yaninna who is head of the organization and her husband Mario.  We called Yannina Saturday after some unsuccessful attempts to reach her by email.  Even though they were busy preparing to host a training session led by SERRV, they made time for us on Sunday morning. 

We were conscious of not wanting to take too much of their time and they were being conscious about wanting to give us a warm greeting despite feeling under pressure to get things done.  After chatting for a few minutes and basic introductions, we said, “is there anything we can do to help get ready”.  They gladly accepted our offer.

I got more of a tour of the organization as I carried crates from one area to another.  Alison and Simon met Yaninna and Mario’s 11 year old daughter (Digwi – not sure about the spelling) as they cleaned dishes and filled salt shakers.  Digwi and Simon hit it off famously which we were both glad to see.

Up until our visit to Manos Amigas, I had been feeling a bit directionless in Lima.  My main focus has been on studying and learning Spanish and helping to take care of Simon.  Perhaps I have felt this way because we are currently staying with a family and haven’t moved into our own place yet and because our volunteer work hasn’t begun.  At any rate, it was nice to have a task at hand and feel like we were contributing during our initial visit to Manos Amigas.

9-22-11

Simon loves to say hello and he has a few ways of doing it.  In the Miami airport he enjoyed running into groups of people with both hands extended as if to give multiple high-fives.  It was fun to see the reaction.  Now after a week in Lima, he waves “hola” and “chao” as well.  A transaction enjoyed by all.

9-20-11

On September 17, Simon, Alison and I left for our grand adventure.  I have been granted a one year sabbatical from my job at Global Gifts, during which time we have rented out our house and moved to Lima, Peru.  After a month of Spanish language classes we will begin volunteer work with a fair trade organization named Manos Amigas.  In addition to our volunteer work, the year will involve travel through South America and eventually to Mexico.

This will be a year of new experiences.  Writing a blog is one of them.  As I went online to set up my blog, I hit a stumbling point when I was required to give my blog a name.  What will this blog be about?  Will it be about me and my family’s experiences traveling, about the people we meet, or about my perspectives on fair trade? Most likely it will be some combination of the above.  My title of Thoughtful Transactions is a reflection, somewhat biased by my work in fair trade, that so many of our daily interactions are transactions.  In my thinking I’m taking a liberal view of transactions and thinking transactions include many interactions between people, not just those involving money or commerce.  At any rate I needed to come up with a name for this blog!