Part II Chocolate: Product of West Africa

Tonight is filled with emotion, tonight is the night I will be leaving. I will be leaving everything I've owned and everything that I've grew up around. Tonight is the night I will be leaving my parents without them knowing. Tonight is the night I will be able to leave my village for more money. I will leaving Ghana which is where I've always leaved. I will be leaving my sister's and brother's behind, I will be going to a village close by. I'm leaving everything behind in order to find a better paying job. I am a very hard worker and I try to earn every cent I make.

The night began and I was very nervous about leaving without telling my parents. They are very important to me, but I have to find a better working condition. After everyone in the house had been asleep for an hour or two I wrote a note stating "I love you all very much, I hope you will understand" and I left, without saying goodbye to my family. The following morning I finally arrived at the village I went to the farmer's home that promised me I could have a job making "$300 for a year’s worth of work" (Timmerman 64). So everything went well and I finally got to start. It was a very tough job, but I made myself do it just thinking about what I’ll get out of doing all this.

Four months has pasted, there was this middle aged young male that came to visit our farm, he was very interested in how we grew the cocoa beans. He asked for me to speak with him and of course I did. I told him all about how I moved here for the better working conditions and the better pay. They he started to ask me why I moved from the first farm in my old village to here I replied back “I Left there because they didn’t have respect for workers. They didn’t give food. They forced us to work” (Timmerman 64). The male replied back “Do they hit you?” (Timmerman 64). I was very cautions with this man he seemed as if he really cared. I told him that they don’t beat they do worse. He took it as if the owners molest us, which is very untrue. I hated the way they treated us here also I just wanted to be back to see my family, is that so much to ask for? The days got longer with this male here I had to take him out on the farm and show him around and how we do things

One night he had asked me and my master if I could go meet a fella he had previously meet in a different village, to be his interrupter. My master had told him I was studying English before I had come to this village. So, I had went and I thought to myself this is the perfect time to leave and go back home I don’t really care about the money I just want to go home. I had went to this fella’s house that he had meet in a village before the one we are in now. I translated everything that he wanted me too and we had to go back to the farmer’s house that I worked for. We stopped at a little bar on the side of the road and I paid “60 cents for a double shot” and I had drank it in two big gulps (Timmerman 106). I told the man that I had to use the restroom and I said to myself “this is the time, the time to get out and go back to Ghana.” So, I just went out the back door instead of going to the restroom and took off I went home to my family, and at that moment I had made the best decision.

Part I Coffee: Product of Colombia

As Timmerman states his travels and the farmers and communities he met, it quickly becomes clear that the things we eat, enjoy and take for granted are actually grown and harvested by people who struggle to put food on their dinner tables. Families are heartbroken because they have to raise a family to work for a company that won’t even help them put dinner on the table. Timmerman explains that a farmer doesn't have to win a Cup of Excellence to have his life impacted by coffee. What can we do? Buying Fair Trade is all consumers, which is the drinkers of coffee, can do about this problem. Not buying or consuming in the product would conflict the workers/farmers lives worse than the way they are getting treated now. A pay cut for them is a huge problem that would mean they couldn’t support their families and put food on the table when needed. Timmerman states in the chapter two that the farmers only get 93 cents for a ten dollar bag of coffee. Which means a pay cut would just get them what they needed and not anything else, maybe not even what they needed. Where Am I Eating, investigates the delicious, taken for granted, food we eat every day. Unnecessary working conditions for the growers, minimum wages and enforcing many more rules like growing and picking more beans in a shorter amount of time. This is where Fair Trade can make a huge amount of difference. Fair Trade guarantees farmers fair wages, for dinner to be on the tables, good working conditions and development rules so they can empower themselves and their communities and see sustainable changes for future generations. Fair Trade is better for the farmers and companies to look on because there is an amount of rules that have to be followed. Fair Trade is something new for the countries like Columbia that grows or raises something they sell to another country. It enforces rules that are luxurious to these kinds of countries. They believe that this is a start for future generations to be respected and also for the future generations to be earning more and supporting more of the family’s needs, like education. Regular trade is something that everyone around the world does it has been in generations and generations of people. Unlike Fair Trade Regular Trade does not guarantee anyone beneficial wages or respectful working conditions. Therefore, some company’s do not honor the 3^rd world Countries, which will work for a dime a day with respectable working conditions, enough to take care and treat the workers with respect. All the companies are worried about, how much they will be making off of a single cup of coffee, and how much of that will be sent to the growers.  So the next time you reach for that seven - eight dollar cup of coffee, take a second to think about who grew and farmed the coffee beans that made that delicious taste in your mouth and ask yourself: Where am I eating?