Christmas Gifts and Christmas Plans

Christmas Presents!

Shopping for Christmas presents? Do you know someone who loves coffee, tea and hot chocolate? Do you love those things things? Well what would you say if I told you that there was a way you could buy your gifts of coffee, tea, hot chocolate, snacks and more and also support Cameron and I here at the Missionary Training Center? You can! We have set up a fundraising account with Equal Exchange and they will send us 25% of all purchases! We only receive the 25% from the unique URL they have given to us so be sure to use the following link (our names are at the top of the site). http://fundraiser.equalexchange.coop/?fundraiser=NEAC001W   Please share the URL link with those you know! Support a missionary couple while drinking a cup of coffee - could you ask for anything better?! We're pretty excited about this and hope you are too!

Heading South

We are coming to Florida next month for Christmas break! We will be heading down in the wee hours of December 21st and plan to be there until January 11th after which point we will shoot back up to Union, Missouri until the 16th or so and be back in Roach in plenty of time for classes to resume January 19th which will also be our six month anniversary! So if you are near the Winter Park or Union area, we would love to get together with you during this time and share with you what the Lord has been teaching us and the desire He has placed on our hearts to serve Him in Papua New Guinea. Please email us at cameron_neace@ntm.org to set up a day and time. We can get together for coffee, a meal or whatever works for you.

Want to learn more about Equal Exchange? 

Below is some information from the Equal Exchange website that we hope will answer most of your questions. But feel free to check out their website for more information or just ask us.

"We were founded in 1986 as the first Fair Trade coffee company in the U.S. 

Our products are, and have always been, 100% Fair Trade. Equal Exchange trades only with democratically-run farmer co-operatives: businesses that are owned and governed democratically by the farmers - so that the benefits of trade can have a truly transformative effect on the lives of the farmers and their communities. Rather than supplying a commodity to a faceless buyer farther down the chain, farmers in the fair trade system develop long-term, direct relationships with fair trade organizations such as Equal Exchange. Fair traders are committed to buying from and supporting
their co-op partners year after year.

Co-ops benefit farmers in many ways:

* Small farmers can gain access to the international market directly, with a voice in the process and the ability to negotiate their own contracts and partnerships
* Cooperatives receive fair trade social premiums, which farmers-members can determine how to use. They know best what the community needs most and now they can afford to get it. (For example: health clinics, schools, offices, warehouses, processing plants for their crops.) Only by pooling community resources, in the form of these premiums, can large projects like these be successful.
* Cooperatives provide long-term stability for farmers by changing the way trade is done. Trading with individual farmers does not have this same capacity for broad social change.

Special challenges facing coffee / chocolate / tea producer

Small farmers have no direct access to the market, making them reliant on the predatory middlemen. Every middleman on the chain gets paid a bit more, with the farmer, who did all the work, being paid the least.

For Coffee:

* Volatile market prices may not meet the costs of growing coffee
* Because coffee is an annual harvest, most coffee farmers have to make their annual harvest payment last an entire year. Because conventional farmers don't receive a fair price, they often take out loans to cover their expenses in the lean months, keeping them in chronic debt.
* 25 million people grow coffee worldwide
*70% of the world's coffee is grown by small-scale coffee farmers with just 5 - 8 acres each

For Chocolate:

* 70% of the world's chocolate comes from West Africa, where forced child labor in the cocoa industry is rampant

For Tea:

Most of the world's tea is grown in large plantations, a relic of the colonial era in Asia

All of Equal Exchange's cocoa products and teas are certified organic

A small percentage of our coffee is not, but comes from farms that are transitioning to organic certification. And fair trade standards require minimal use of harmful chemicals and destructive farming practices, even in 'conventional' (non-organic-certified) products.

Why coffee, tea and cocoa? 

None of these foods can be grown in the U.S., so all are imported. Also coffee is the largest food import in the U.S. and we consume over 20% of the world's coffee. As a result, we are particularly disconnected from the sources of these staples of our 21st century diet and the farmers who grew them, many of whom face real challenges."