'Development'
Elizabeth Coleman’s article (20 September) showed the subject of child labour in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to be very different from how we often imagine. I’d like to draw Friends’ attention to some other issues her article touched on.
‘The soil has become so poor, because of mining, that agriculture is no longer an option.’ So the global north’s demands for minerals to maintain our way of life has destroyed the option of a sustainable way of life. The loss of connection to and respect for the land is reflected in children’s aspirations: to be miners (no other jobs available locally); to go to the city or to university; to become politicians or ‘a rich gold dealer’. And they want education (where they’ll acquire our unsustainable aspirations and culture).
While the lives of children, mostly boys, working in the mines is not as bad as we might imagine, the plight of girls, ‘most of whom make money by being paid for sex’, is worse. In other words, women and girls have become dependent and subservient.
This process of removing people from sustainable ways of life, making them dependent on waged work, and the further dependency of the unwaged, creating inequality, is the road to development.
Wendy Pattinson
International Day for Peace
21 September is the UN International Day for Peace and for the past few years Henley-on-Thames Quakers have been distributing white poppies to people in the town square. This year we gave out 200 white poppies during one very wet hour on that day. The poppies were welcomed but no one had heard of the International Day for Peace.
I have never heard or read any mention of this day on the press or radio. White poppies seem particularly appropriate for a day of peace, perhaps even more appropriate than on Remembrance Day when the focus is on those who have lost their lives in war. We used to distribute white poppies in the weeks before 11 November but were frequently met by expressions of concern that we were somehow in conflict with the red poppies.
We would be interested to know what other Friends think of this idea.
Gillian Wilson
