Sometimes talk of slavery and human trafficking can drag a girl down... am I stating the obvious? Haha... probably.
40% of the world's cocoa is produced on the west coast of Africa in countries like Cote D'Ivoire. Child labour is common as is the buying and selling of children as merchandise. Stop The Traffik, a human rights agency in Britain, put out the call for us regular folk to host "THE WORLD'S LARGEST CHOCOLATE FONDUE PARTY". And we, the DOCK youth group of the Lac La Biche Evangelical Free Church, signed up!
Last November (2008), we purchased Fair Trade chocolate, melted it down and HAD FUN! We learned about how cocoa is produced from bean to bar, how our demand for products like chocolate drive much of the labour bondage in the world today, and raised a few bucks.
We dipped EVERYTHING from jalpenos, to onions to GUM WRAPPERS (edible someone said?), to beef jerky to cookies to pretzels. To my surprise, the ONION was voted the tastiest chocolate dipper of the night! I took everyone's word on that one... I steered away from the onions.
It was a fun night and I'm proud of my gang!
