Wednesday Kwesi, our IFESH Country Representative, came with Charlie Feezel, the Education Program Director for the World Cocoa Foundation. Together we visited the Agogo Primary School that is a part of the college I work for. We meet to discuss what things we want to accomplish this year. Last year, the IFESH teacher began a pen pal program with a school in Pennsylvania, which was very successful. We are discussing continuation of this program or possibly doing something via the Internet, but currently the Internet isn’t very reliable here. We just want the interchanges between schools to be maximized. We also too a trip to our Teacher Resource Center to show what we had done with the space, although the TFA’s before us made it very easy to look good. Pictured are the students that were apart of the pen pal program last year, the principal of the primary school-Ellen, Kwesi, Agogo Presbyterian Training College Vice Principal- Gertrude, Charlie, Betsy, the primary school’s secretary, and myself.
Thursday Diane Mull from International Initiative to End Child Labor came to visit and discuss our progress so far and review with us our goals for our year here. Her visit was very helpful and it gave us more guidance in our duties. Ma and Papa have done a fantastic job with our job description here, but Diane made sure that we understood IFESH’s objectives for our country for the year. Diane and Charlie are both apart of group working with ECHOES. Their overall objective, as I a have taken it, is to improve the lives of Cocoa Farmers and their families and their communities. Following is a picture of Betsy, Diane, Gertrude, and myself in the Teacher Resource Center.
This week was eventful!
2 comments:
I'm glad to learn about your efforts. We at Equal Exchange (a Fair Trade coffee, tea & chocolate importer & advocacy group) have been trying to raise public awareness in the U.S. of the continued problem of forced child labor in the West African cocoa trade.
Unfortunately, based on our 7 years doing this we do not believe the World Cocoa Foundation, & the huge cocoa & chocolate corporations behind the Foundation, are doing nearly enough to honor their promises and press releases, let alone to really root out the problem of forced child labor.
A just released 400+ page U.S. Dept of Labor funded study confirms this.
Consequently one of the many things that we're doing is to distribute a unique curriculum for children in grades 4 through 9 about cocoa farming, including the child labor issue, and about how Fair Trade and small-farmer co-operatives help to tackle both the child labor problem and the otherwise chronic poverty of the world's 2,000,000 small-scale cocoa farmers.
The cataylst for creating the curriculum came from school teachers and administors who were already using our Fair Trade Fundraising Program and wanted complementary teaching materials so the kids would better understand how these Fair Trade chocolate bars,etc could help other kinds in cocoa-growing communities.
Interestingly one aspect of the Fundraising program is a pen-pal program between U.S. kids and their peers in cocoa-growing families in the Dominican Republic, where we buy most of our organic Fair Trade cocoa. Already hundreds of kids are exchanging letters.
I value your comments and helpful link to your curriculum and do believe that help is still needed in cocoa communities, but I am proof that the World Cocoa Foundation is taking steps to improve the communities of their farmers.
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