This has to be a short post, but I wanted quickly to share an experience I thought was really cool. Most of you know that when I was in South Bend, I worked at a fair trade shop called Just Goods. If you haven’t been, you should really make the trip. My friend Becky runs it, and everything in the store represents a worker or group of workers who was paid a fair wage to make something under safe conditions out of environmentally friendly materials. Plus, all of the stuff is super cool. Anyway, one of the companies I really love is called Global Mamas. I even brought with me one of their skirts which I received as a gift. It is a collective of women from Ghana who make brightly colored clothing and accessories which are very pretty and far less expensive than most fair trade things. Anyway, I was with a group of PCVs and I noticed a the pattern on one of the volunteers’ shirts was really familiar. Sure enough, when I asked him where he got it, he told me that his post is really near the border with Ghana, and this local company called Global Mamas sells things at his local market.
Of course, Global Mamas is a pretty big company now, but it was neat to see the real life connection between the things we buy in the US and the people who make them elsewhere in the world. We should never think that our consumer choices don’t have a real impact.
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Thought I'd mention... Samantha's purple Global Mamas dress is not only one of her favorites (she asks to wear her "purple dress" all the time) but it's also one of her outfits that gets (by far!) the most compliments. Other parents seem to recognize that it's an outfit they're not likely to find in any stores around here, so its bright colors and unique patterns get a LOT of compliments!
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