Alan Stevens – Working in Asia
Inspired by Rod Woodworth’s article about his visit to the Taj Mahal, it brought back many enjoyable memories of the time I spent working with OXFAM as Fair Trade Director, during which I spent quite a lot of time in Delhi and also had the pleasure of visiting the Taj Mahal. Two of those memories are recalled below.
Fair Trade organisations are in place throughout Europe and their aims are to ensure that small scale producers are provided with support to develop the necessary business and production skills to generate self-sufficiency, a distribution network through which to sell their products to the market and to promote the concept that producers are paid a fair rate for the goods they make.
OXFAM was a leading member of the European Fair Trade Association and at the time my job for 4 years was as Fair Trade Director. That mainly included representing the company at Fair Trade organisations in the UK and Europe to help develop a coordinated approach to promoting fair Trade, acting as a Board Director of Café Direct, and taking management responsibility for a small team of 9 staff working overseas on capacity development in the poorer areas of the world plus a 100 strong business team and distribution centre in and around Oxford.
One of the nine overseas team was a guy from Bangladesh named Mohammed Islam. Mohammed grew up in a very poor household in Dhaka and in his childhood sold matches on the street to help generate income for his family. He stood around 5’6” tall but was a larger than life character with a big deep voice and a hearty laugh. He was very kind to my oldest son Nick who was at the time a trainee teacher. He organised a month’s summer work experience for Nick in Bangladesh where he lived in the villages and travelled around evaluating the effectiveness of an OXFAM teaching project, which culminated in a published report and a concluding presentation to OXFAM management. The following Spring Mohammed visited the UK, so I invited him to stay with us in Maidenhead for the weekend. We decided that he might be interested in a surprise visit to the nearby Windsor Castle, thinking it would be a new experience for him. Towards the end of our visit we were walking down to see the chapel, when he suddenly looked up at a building on our left and announced that he had slept in the room we were looking at. I first of all thought he must be joking, but it turned out that the daughter of the Chaplin of the Windsor Castle chapel worked at OXFAM and had invited him to stay during an earlier weekend. Who would have expected our man from Dhaka to have been so near to our British royalty, and modest enough not to let on and spoil our surprise visit.
Another member of the team was Retno who lived in Jakarta, Indonesia. In 1999 Sue and I visited China on holiday and booked a week in Bali on the way home. One of our producer partners was the Lombok Pottery Centre from whom we purchased good quality products to sell in our OXFAM shops. With Lombok located just off the coast of Bali, I invited Retno to come over and to join us and organise a day visit for us to see the Lombok potters in action.
Select individual pictures to expand and scan around other pictures in the group.
The member potters of the Lombok Pottery Centre are women who work from home using handed down skills from earlier generations to produce pots that are then sold by the LPC in both local and export markets. The women are paid a fair price for their pots and also benefit from an annual profit share, all of which helps them to provide their children with a better education to equip them with the qualifications to achieve a better life, plus essential health care when required. When we visited, our producer (above) was working on her front step. Her husband was asleep as he had no work at the time and her children were at school. The house she lived in was largely built from the proceeds of her pottery work.
The production process is a very simple one, but it takes a lot of skill to produce a good quality finished product with the limited materials and equipment available. The terracotta pots are made at home from locally sourced clay and then fired in bonfires of dried rice stalks. The popular black pattern is achieved by adding rice husks during the firing, which when burned add the black coloration.
An example of the style of the Terra Cotta pots produced by women in small villages in Lombok and sold in shops like OXFAM all around Europe.
It was very rewarding for us to see our OXFAM Fair Trade operation at work first hand and when we returned home, what we had learned from our visit provided strong motivation for our UK based team to continue their good work. All in all, this visit provided me with one of the happiest memories from my working life.
Dhaka is the capital city of Bangladesh, in southern Asia. Set beside the Buriganga River, it’s at the centre of national government, trade and culture. The 17th-century old city was the Mughal capital of Bengal, and many palaces and mosques remain. American architect Louis Khan’s National Parliament House complex typifies the huge, fast-growing modern metropolis.