Trade As One

For the next few weeks, Chad and Jodi Mulder will be posting about their experiences visiting Trade as One producers in Africa. Their 6 week trip will take them to over a dozen producers in Uganda, Rwanda, and Kenya.

This is not what we had in mind. When we started planning a sabbatical a few years ago our focus was pretty clear: take some time off to recharge our life batteries, travel to fun places and be together as a family. As we wandered through Kenya’s largest slum today, a nauseas feeling hit with all the subtlety of a major league fastball to the gut. Yes, there certainly was an unpleasant smell in the air. After all, trash litters the streets, animals roam free and there are no obvious signs of sanitary systems. In spite of this, our reaction was less sensorial and more fundamental, more human, maybe even more spiritual. How could we possibly live in a world that is charting the human genome, has established orbiting space stations, amassed and cataloged millions of volumes of easily searchable electronic information, while at the same time, allowing an incredible number of people (approximately 1 million in the Kibera slum alone) to live in unimaginable filth and dehumanizing conditions where HIV/AIDS runs rampant and extreme is the norm? This, we were reminded, is not what we had in mind.

After spending a month in northern California working with the Trade as One team, we’ve started a 40-day tour of east Africa to visit a number of Fair Trade producers. Throughout the journey we’ll be sharing our experiences through weekly blog posts to tradeasone.com. Here’s the back story that explains how we got here:

The Past Few Years

After moving to Evanston, IL in 2003, we soon realized our desire to keep up a connection to the world outside the U.S.  As a result, we made a commitment to travel internationally at least once each year.  Since then, we’ve spent Thanksgiving (and some non-holidays) in a variety of places like Bosnia & Croatia, Singapore & the Philipines, Barbados, London & Dubai, Belize, Greece and Costa Rica.  Each time, we seem to come back with new learnings about culture and a strengthened desire to be engaged in efforts that improve economic development in struggling countries.

Over the past couple of years various reading, conversations, influential movies, and involvement at Willow Creek Community Church have collectively prompted us to wrestle with how our faith intersects with our daily life- particularly in light of the gospel message calling on us to care for “the least of these.”  We’ve begun to develop a new understanding of social injustice issues and have gravitated toward people and experiences that can help further our understanding of the shocking depth of injustice in our modern world.

All of this created a desire to take some type of sabbatical.  Many of you know we spent hours talking about the options – what should we do, where would we go?

Why Fair Trade?

In April 2009 we met Nathan George, the founder of Trade as One.  Getting to know him more and hearing the Trade as One story led us to contact him and ask if we could spend a few months doing project work for Trade as One.  Over the summer we began to solidify some thoughts about spending time away, and during the next few months, finalized plans for a 12-week leave in winter 2010.

We continue to learn more about Fair Trade and it’s power to transform whole communities in the developing world.  We see it as a concrete and effective way to empower people to move out of poverty into a more just way of living.

So here we are, sitting in a hotel in Nairobi after a gut punch of an afternoon, hoping that in some small way, we can be a part of the solution. More to come.