Monday, May 3, 2010

Fair Trade Worship Together


This Sunday's Worship Together was led by our fair trade rep, Rosemary, and focussed on Traidcraft's campaign to get the big tea producers to go fair trade. My six-year-old was reluctant to help out with a game of hangman that eventually spelled 'Justice' but later decided that was the best bit. The teams called upon to build towers out of straws or newspaper admirably illustrated the importance of having decent materials to work with (amazingly the newspaper tower stayed up until the end of the service in spite of running pre-schoolers). At the end our signed campaign postcards went into the collection plate.

I was taking down the 'sharing board' postcards, prior to putting them into a booklet for people to refer to, and was asked if it had achieved anything. I've been asked for a DVD set, but I said my impression had been that it wasn't really working, despite the enthusiasm of some people for the ideal - delightfully I was proved wrong later that afternoon when John turned up on our doorstep asking to borrow our jam pan. So, I'm now going to try to put regular reminders in the news sheet (with examples of what's on offer) in the hope that this will help encourage more carbon-reducing sharing. Suzanne also suggested that sharing time/skills would be similarly valuable. Given that I've recently been too busy even to keep up with maintaining a weekly green tip slot I may be being over ambitious here, but this is the plan anyway.

Election Hustings - Reading East

Having just read the Reading Post on-line article on the hustings held at the Hindu Temple for Reading East, I'm deeply disappointed to find the author made no mention of climate change. The first two questions were about climate change - what had the candidates done themselves and were their parties committed to 40% reductions by 2020. They all agreed that climate change is a very serious issue. The Conservative candidate, Rob Wilson, said he'd installed good insulation in his home, the Labour candidate, Anneliese Dodds, said she had given up her car and the Lib Dem candidate, Gareth Epps, recommended the green electricity company he uses (I'm afraid I forgot to take a notebook and cannot recall which it was). There were also several questions touching on international development which were again disappointingly ignored by the article.