Fair enough

This weekend brings Fairtrade Fortnight to an end and two youth events have rounded it off rather neatly for me.

Yesterday at Pulse we had mostly Fairtrade ingredients in our cocktails at HaRVey's bar including a fabulous Banana smoothie.

(Lookng back to the discussions about young people and junk food, yesterday we also experimented in putting out fruit as well as our usual sweets, chocolate and crisps. Even though one of the lads bet me "my pride" that no-ne would eat the fruit, the grapes and satsumas went down very well indeed. The only trouble is that grapes are far more expensive than crisps!)

Then this evening I was invited to talk about Fair Trade to a group of young people at Freedom in Sandhurst. I demonstrated the need for Fair Trade with a short "unfair" game of skittles and talked about our need to support Fair Trade for the sake, not only of those who produce our food, but also of ourselves as we seek to be the people God wants us to be, seeing people as Christ would see them.

I left them with the challenge to do something:

Support the MAKEPOVERTYHISTORY campaign through wearing a band and sending a card to Tony Blair or by making a change in their household shopping to buy fair trade goods, not necessarily of all items but to change at least one thing (coffee, tea, orange juice, hot chocolate, bananas, sugar, honey, muesli, etc) to a fairly traded alternative.