Yesterday, day one of the Abolition Academy (the week’s theme: the supply chain), was pretty fact-filled and unemotional, overall. Even the movie we watched about the trafficking and forced labor of children in the Ivory Coast’s cocoa plantations, The Dark Side of Chocolate, went very light on the heart-wrenching details; from what I know of the abuses against these children, they could have shown us much worse, but they were very restrained. One exchange in the movie, however, brought tears from me that wouldn’t stop.
Children are lured or simply kidnapped from the surrounding countries–Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria–and taken to the plantations, from which most never return, much less send home the money they were promised they’d earn. The filmmakers follow a bus that takes Malian children to the village closest to the country’s border with the Ivory Coast. Once there, they’re taken by motorcycle taxi over the border to an Ivory Coast village, from where they’re distributed to whoever buys them around the country.
Once on the Ivory Coast side, the director went up to a little boy who was sitting alone and crying, and asked him why he was crying. “I’m looking for Ali,” the boy said.
“Who’s Ali?”
“Ali. The man driving the bus. The bus over there,” the boy said, crying and gesturing toward the village square as if the bus had disappeared from there. My heart broke to see this child who wanted only to go back to the bus, who didn’t even realize that he was now in another village, in another country.
Sermons in Stones 
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July 26, 2011 at 7:35 am
NakedTheologian
My tender-hearted daughter learned about chocolate and its connection to the traffic of children in her world cultures class last year. Since then she can’t eat chocolate–it makes her physically ill because she’s thinking about the children you described so poignantly in your blog. She shared a few of the details with me who had managed to remain in blissful ignorance for far too long. But it was your blog post that brought home for me the horror of the situation. Now I believe that every time I’ll look at a piece of chocolate (other than fair trade!), I’ll think about that little boy crying and looking for Ali. I love (no, adore) chocolate but there’s no pleasure in eating something that’s tied to so much suffering. If you ever wonder if your posts make a difference, now you know. Please blog about what else my daughter and I can do besides boycotting chocolate!
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July 26, 2011 at 7:44 am
Amy Zucker Morgenstern
Boycotts and buycotts really help–that was the focus of the teacher’s follow-up to the movie. All the major chocolate producers get cocoa from slave labor (or, in the case of Hershey, refuse to report anything –no doubt because they know what they’d have to say). The only thing that will make them change is to hit them in the bottom line.
Right now the pressure is being put on Hershey: see http://www.raisethebarhershey.org for action steps. I think I’m going to have a Chocolate Night at church where we watch this or another film, eat fair trade chocolate, and take action–maybe placing a bulk order with a fair-trade candymaker for our Halloween chocolate, and of course telling the other chocolate companies that that’s where we’re putting our money, and what they have to do to get our business back. I got that idea from the International Muslim Abolition Movement (IMAM, love it), linked from Not For Sale: http://www.notforsalecampaign.org/action/faith/muslim/
Free2work.org is Not For Sale’s program rating companies of all kinds–they also have a phone app.
Your daughter is going to help make this the world we want to see! Congratulations on raising her right!
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July 26, 2011 at 9:00 am
Amy Zucker Morgenstern
P.S. Not all boycotts are useful. I’ll be learning more about what makes an effective consumer campaign over the next couple of days–will post again.
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July 26, 2011 at 5:04 pm
Susan Z
You do not have to boycott chocolate, but BUY FAIR TRADE chocolate and help those coops which are making a difference in their lives by using only fair trade practices. If you do not go to Tenthousandvillages.com to buy some, try greatergood.com to get your chocolate fix. Don’t stop, start helping those who are already doing the right thing!
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July 26, 2011 at 10:50 am
sorrygnat
The pain one would feel if felt completely about children’s suffering, women’s suffering, and all the other abuses, too numerous to mention, if really felt to one’s core, would produce madness, but then again, it might produce results from the peoples of the world to say, “no more, no more.” Excellent article.
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