The Best of Intentions

Welcome to Fair and Square! I am Annie, and this is my blog about my personal journey through the world of Fair Trade.

"Fair Trade" means a lot of things to a lot of different people. While I have included links on this blog to larger, more comprehensive websites about Fair Trade, this blog is a lot smaller in content. It is just about me. Me and my family and the ways that Fair Trade has opened my eyes to the world around me and to my own habits.

A little history. About two years ago, I purchased several baskets of coffee, tea, cocoa and chocolate for my sisters at Christmas from the Fair Trade group at our church. At the time, I had no idea what Fair Trade was. All I knew was that I had a 9-month old baby, limited shopping time, and a memory that seemed to be functioning at low capacity. Without much convincing, I bought the baskets, exchanged pleasantries with the women selling them, and went on my way.

That might have been the end of my Fair Trade story, if I had not met my friend Emily. Emily was (and is) a member of the Fair Trade group that sold the baskets. When I properly met her, over a year later, at a church festival, I remembered the baskets, and I was able to ask her about them. We started talking about Fair Trade, and a part of me that had been asleep for a long time began to wake up.

Before having my children, I would have characterized myself as someone concerned about the planet and the people who live on it. After the birth of my daughter (my first baby), I kind of stopped caring about other people for a while and only worried about...well....my people. I think when I saw how many diapers a newborn can soil in a single day, and how much money it actually does cost to raise a family on a single income, my heart got a little hard. I didn't think that I had the time anymore to go help out at our local soup kitchen on Thursday nights (if the people there could tolerate colicky crying from a baby bjorn anyways). I didn't feel like I could wash out cloth diapers on five hours of sleep a night. And horror of horrors...sometimes after a day of errands, I found it easier to roll through McDonald's than to prepare something nutritious for my family. I felt like I was in survival mode at the time, and I just needed to get through however I could.

By the time I met Emily, though, I was looking for a change. I wanted to do something. I wanted to extend myself a little bit beyond the immediate needs of my small family. I titled this entry "the best of intentions" because I feel that good intentions get a bad rap in our society. Most of the time when you hear the phrase "the best of intentions", it is said with a sneer, and usually implies that whomever had these good intentions was an unhelpful dolt. But good intentions are the origins of truly good deeds, of social change, and sometimes of personal transformations. So I take them seriously. And I had them. I just didn't know what to do with them.

More on that in future entries!

For now, I will just say, that I decided to write this blog because my journey through Fair Trade is a journey that anyone could take. Being involved in Fair Trade, I have met many amazing people - TRULY amazing individuals, who have taken incredible journeys and done huge enormously good things. I hope to write about some of these people here. But I am not one of these folks. I am just one person doing what I can do. One of the choir, if you will. Choir members wanted!