I Eat what I want…and feed a few folks in-between (dedicated to Teun van de Keuken)

I Eat what I want…and feed a few folks in-between (dedicated to Teun van de Keuken)

I was reading an article today called: “Dutchman: Jail me, I ate slave-made Ivory Coast chocolate” the article goes on to say “-- A Dutch journalist asked an Amsterdam court on Friday to convict him for eating chocolate, saying by doing so he was benefiting from child slavery on cocoa farms in Ivory Coast.”
Now here is my point, I’m an American that lives in Lima, Peru and St. Paul, Minnesota. If you ever go down to Miraflores, in Lima, any day, any time of the day, of the year, you will see children selling candy (this is also happen in the downtown area in Huancayo, Peru). This is normal, and yet I do not hear anyone hollering about that. If you ask the kids why they do this, they will say: “We have no mother and father, and live with other relatives, if we want cloths and food, this is what we have to do.” How old are the kids…between six and perhaps twelve. After that age, I’m not sure what happens to the girls, but the boys become shoeshine boys. Maybe Teun van de Keuken, who is causing all this yuck in the Ivory Coast, should take a trip to Lima. If you stop buying from the kids, as Teun suggest, who is going to pick up the tab for feeding them. You see we all have our moral request, without any long term solutions. Maybe he wants to feed them, care for them. They don’t want to do what they got to do, they just got to do it, to survive. What little they have is in the hands of the few folks that are willing to care for them, that make but a few dollars themselves a day. Take that ugly loving parent away, and they got an even uglier life ahead of them. It is easy for many folks coming to Peru to say: you should do this, and look at that…etc., and go home and sit on their fat…you know what, and thank God they don’t have to return.

The only thing worse than being poor, is starving to death.