Zambian Street Children

Last year some video material appeared on the Internet showing sheep getting mistreated and injured during their shearing for wool. Many animal rights activists and animal welfare activists took this as a sign to encourage people not to buy any more products based on sheep-wool and instead focus on animal-friendly cotton.
While I may approve of people fighting for animal-welfare, I still think that human beings – especially children and people from the least developing countries – deserve more protection than them. Fact is however that according to a brochure produced by the “United States Department of Labor” – the one my boyfriend Jörn gave me as a Christmas-gift – that in Argentina, Azerbaijan, Benin, China, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic, Mali, Paraguay, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Zambia and Uzbekistan – three of which being least developing countries – owners of cotton-plantations commonly use children as low-paid and awfully-treated workers. These children have to grow the plants, do the harvest, can’t go to school during that time and often their wages are just good enough in order for the family not to starve to death.
While it may be an easy task to control whether or not a farmer living in an industrial nation treats his sheep properly, it may be a lot harder to check whether or not the owner of a cotton-plant in a least developed country – where these plantations are often hard to reach due to their location and where bribery and other even worse crimes happen more often than here – treats his workers properly and never uses children for this hard work.
In fact that’s the only reason why I though still thinking that animal-welfare is important disapprove of people encouraging others to buy cotton-products instead of sheep-wool-products, because to me the fight against child-labor matters more than the fight against animal-cruelty committed by just a handful of shepherds.
Another last pro-sheep-wool argument and contra-cotton-argument of mine is that both sheep-wool-based and cotton-based products are made of not just one raw material, but many…and often aren’t even produced in the same country the raw-material comes from, making the label that says which country this cloth or whatever comes from rather useless. You can’t just say things like “Oh! The label says that this cotton-wool-based shirt was made in Great Britain and not in Argentina, Azerbaijan, Benin, China, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic, Mali, Paraguay, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Zambia or Uzbekistan. Thus I can buy it without having to worry about child-labor!”

The German “ApoBank” says that for each collateral bill made by their customers, they are donating 100€ to an educational project in the LDC of Zambia…or so I was told by a relative of mine who is working for them and who knows about my interest in least developed countries.

Considering that this year the “World Water Day” was a Sunday during the fasting period many clerics – including the priest of the church where I often hear the preach – told us to treat water more economically. While 768 people all around the world don’t have access to water from a clean tap and 3.600 children – among them more than 900 infants – per day die after drinking dirty water.
Now many people would ask the priest from this community why this should make us spare more water. Shouldn’t we instead spend it all the more grateful that it’s them instead of us? Actually no, because by wasting water he also meant that to produce the soy-beans and maze we either consume ourselves or feed to animals from feeding-lots, to produce coffee or even just clothes these developing countries that already lack water need to waste a lot more clean and drinkable water. They use the clean and thus healthy water to produce the things European and American enterprises buy. Thus it’s us the responsible for this waste of water. Partly this can be avoided by buying fair-trade clothes, coffee and food. Also reading where things came from could be useful. Many of the berries, apples, hazelnuts and pears we buy for example don’t come from developing countries. Thus even if they aren’t labelled as fair-trade products, it is save to presume that no developing country had to waste any resource on this product. The same goes for clothes. Usually there is a label that states which country this thing was made in. Thus all you have to know is whether or not the country mentioned on the label is a developing country.
They say that just to supply Germans 4.000 litres of fresh water per day are wasted on non-fair trade products made in developing countries. Among them 15.000 litres to produce pork and beef and 140 litres to produce non-fair trade coffee. After needing so much water to produce things there isn’t even enough to supply every public school with toilets. Then he also complimented those members of this Catholic community who according to what he heard avoided using the car as often as possible during the fasting period. These members all live only a few streets from the train- and bus station – here we have many of these. He says that what most people don’t even know is that not only the emissions caused by cars are harmful to the environment, but also a lot of water is needed to produce cars and fuel. Not all of this water comes fron industrial countries…
According to the priest statistics say that the situation is especially bad in Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Zambia, Somalia and South-Sudan.
—-—-——
P.S. If you wonder how I could remember all these dates: I took notes! I sometimes go to church with a notebook and a pen in my hands when I expect to hear something like this.

According to the latest sample of the magazine “GEO” 20 million citizens of developing countries actually would be able to do work if only they had a wheelchair to go to the working place and to move around there. As things are not like that they are unemployed and often people from the neighborhood talk of them as a burden for their entire family.

On Friday at 7PM there was a beneficial concert in the Stiftskirche (the protestant church of a village named Dettingen) to collect money for Genadendal in South Africa. The choir “Okosi Project” itself was from this area. Their founder had the idea of founding this, because as you know South Africa is very poor and even the best students struggle to get a decent job. This causes a lot of frustrations among teenagers and thus some of them sooner or later start to do very stupid things that get them into trouble. So the founder just picked up some adolescents from very disadvantaged homes and offered them to participate in his choir every day after school. Meanwhile they even produce their own CD’s – of which I bought one after the concert as the songs they played as well as these native-African instruments, like the marimbas they used for their songs really were to my liking. Anyway as I just said I went there and I was accompanied by my friend Jennifer. We both enjoyed it, but especially I was very happy when they played my favorite song two times. Once only with instruments and the second time also with the singers. However they really played many very different songs, like “You Raise Me Up”, “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”, “Halleluja”, “Wavin’ Flag” and many more. A kind of amusing event occurred when they started singing a song without even telling us its title. So we had to figure which language it was. It didn’t sound like English or French, nor like Spanish, I thought. So I figured it had to be a native language or some Eastern-European language as this sounded very Eastern-European to me – even though I don’t speak a word of any Eastern-European language at all. Suddenly the scales fell from my eyes and I realized “This is a German church song and just due to the accent of theirs it took me some time to understand this. Silly me!” However from that moment on I found it very nice to hear this song being sung with a foreign accent, because that is what made this performance so exceptional.
In the end the minister thanked this band in four languages, namely German, English and two native languages for coming all the way from South Africa to this particular small German village.
All in all Jennifer and I agreed that this had been a wonderful event even though -as I told her – I was a little disappointed that there were so little spectators as Dettingen is a very small and rather unpopular village.
In addition to the CD I also brought home a South African flag and several informative prospects about charitable work in different African countries. The “Liebenzeller Mission”
Liebenzeller Mission
Sparkasse Pforzheim Calw
Bank Code: 666 500 85
Conto-Nr.: 33 00 234
IBAN-Nr.:
DE27 6665 0085 0003 3002 34
SWIFT-BIC:
PZHSDE66
for example runs a free hospital in Bangladesh as in this poor country diseases spread easily, but most people can’t pay a decent treatment. This hospital however even supplies those who need it due to their disease with a special diet. In case of a disaster they even have some first-aid stations and also places where they teach pregnant ladies what to do during their pregnancy as most of them don’t even know what a foetus or an embryo requires. In addition to that they spread scholarships among very intelligent Bangladeshis. Similar hospitals are also run in Zambia and Burundi. But also South-Africa causes problems as here AIDS spreads very fast. To be precise it spreads so fast that it even does harm to this country’s economy. In Malawi the case is even more extreme as here we we have about 150 cases of people dying of HIV every single day. Except for the orphanages run by “Liebenzeller Mission” there are little to no institutions that would care of the children left behind and except for the native South Africans hired and paid by this mission there is little to no person who would earn his living by teaching people about HIV and how to prevent getting infected with this virus.
Last but not least I took a magazine called “Werdet Meine Zeugen” in which among other things a young-looking gentleman speaks about his experience in a Nepalese prison he and a group of several people visited to treat the people there with medicine, dressing material and salves. He said that even he – though he already did several similar missions before – was disturbed by what he saw. There were men who were forced to do hard labor despite injuries and infections all over their hands and despite the fact that they were underfed and sick due to a bad diet. He even found a number of people with back-problems as this prison was so crowded that most of them were forced to sleep on the stony and very cold floor as well as standing bent over during their work and in their crowded cells where the high number of people didn’t allow them to stand straight. The gentleman who reported this said that most of them presumably were innocent as they had told him that they hadn’t even gotten a trial before being brought there. As it seems the reason for this unfair treatment of innocent men is that Nepal is one of the poorest countries in the world where most people couldn’t even afford the education needed to become a layer or judge. As a result Nepal is in serious need of more of these as the little number of judicial personnel is overstressed with the high number of cases they are forced to treat.