MANGOES ARE AWESOME

Recently Freeset has been engaging an NGO called ASK to do some work for us - primarily in developing our fair trade practices and certification. The business is creating a producer committee where some representatives of each of the production units are elected and the group makes decisions regarding the vision and various business decisions. So the group will be made up of 7 elected employee representatives and 3 people from management. The elections are being held in about 10 days. The women are very enthusiastic about the idea, and it will give them more of a say in how the business operates, which is great.

In a slightly different political arena, the elections for the Kolkata Municipal Corporation are coming up. At present our balcony has flags from two of the major parties (no one has any qualms about using your balcony for anything (from religious festivals to politics to light hanging). There's graffiti on every conceivable wall, and there was a story in the paper the other day about a school wall which all 3 parties had 'accidentally' scrawled on, even though electioneering on government buildings is banned.

As we write this, there's a political rally on our corner. It's about 200m away from the house, but there are loudspeakers all the way up our street and the guy is yelling as it is. On our verandah it's marginally quieter than the average NZ rock concert. We just went for a walk and it's actually quieter where he's speaking than in our house, so we joked about taking our dinner down to the rally.

Also in West Bengal, but unrelated to those elections, there's been a bit of unrest in Darjeeling (about 300-400 km to the North of here) lately. There have been various strikes and protests, which culminated a couple of days ago in the leader of one political faction being hacked to death in broad daylight by thugs from the main party while armed police watched and twiddled their thumbs. The main faction that did the thuggery doesn't like the West Bengal government, and it sounds like the authorities were too concerned about annoying the main faction to worry about such minor issues as law and order. The front page of Kolkata's major newspaper carried a colour photo of the rival leader bleeding to death.

Aside from lots of posters and occasional loud political meetings, politics Kolkata style is thankfully much more restrained, but it's a shocking contrast from the beautiful, peaceful Darjeeling we encountered. And a reminder that, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse, we live in a crazy country.

In lighter news:

Our flat mum and dad (Karl and Lyn) left for their home assignment in Australia, so we now have two young women staying with us who are also working with Freeset. Tim calls it Team Oestrogen.

We seem to talk about weather most times we blog - possibly because, as at home, it is one of the common conversations. It also affects life here in a big way. With the heat at the moment (middle of summer so temp between 30 and 40degrees day and night, with high humidity), it is difficult to keep food. None of the Freeset women (and most of the people in this community I think) have fridges, so they would be shopping at least once a day. They are very cautious about how much to cook each time as any leftovers will go bad quickly.

I (Sarah) have had the privilege of an Indian fashion designer helping me for a few days - he has been in India fashion week and is going to London fashion week also. Fortuitous timing given the design computer has died needing some major work before I can access files again. So we are going back to some idea generation, pen and paper and saris... and research.