Shopping
In Starbucks having coffee – I saw a friend and I said to her, “I love what you’re wearing”. She said it cost a pound. ONE POUND from a well know clothes store.
Now that got me thinking and speaking – and I said this store probably exploited people. Then I felt bad for saying that (after all she was wearing the top as I said it!!) so I went home and did what I do when I don’t know something – I googled it! And then watched a short clip following a celebrity into the slums of Bangladesh where the workers of the factory who provide the clothes to this shop lived.
This set me on a journey of conviction and repentance for my apathy. For the way I consume products without really thinking about the effect it has on others.
At the beginning of the year I was in a slum in Bangalore in a small church full of women and children. At the end of the worship, as the visitors to this church, we got the opportunity to hand out bags of rice to the women of the church who were widows. It broke my heart. They were so grateful to receive those bags of rice. It was nothing really. Just a bag of rice. But it was how they survived.
Many of the widows were old and there was no one to look after them. They were uneducated and had been economically dependent on their husbands. And when their husbands died they were destitute, so this church provided them with food twice a month. How amazing. The children in this church were all being sponsored by people from the West and they were really cool. They could speak English so we could have conversations and we had fun times together. They told me stories and played games with me. One girl told me about how she was the only person in her family who was a 
Christian and how she found that really hard and she asked me to pray with her.
To witness poverty in that very real way changed me. It humbled me. They were so grateful for the little they had. I saw how education gives people hope, lifts people out of poverty. Enables them to dream, enables them to aim higher.
Back home in the West, outside of the reality of the day to day grind of poverty and desperate need, we live lives full of things. We have disposable wardrobes, food we throw away, disposable incomes. I don’t want to feel guilty about the things that I own but I want to be responsible with my money and possessions. For me the outworking of that has been to attempt to live a simple life – not legalistic but simple.
Our actions in the West affect people in the developing world whether we like it or not 
and the actions of the people in the developing world affect us too. We can continue to ignore the fact that people are suffering in order to produce us cheap clothes. We can continue to profit from other people’s poverty or we can choose to spend our money wisely.
Recently in the news there has been lots about the end of disposable fashion because of the recession and because it’s just time for the tide to turn and for us to return to the days of mending and investing in good quality garments. Then there’s also the fact that we in the West, cocooned as we are, do not need to confront the reality of the women who work in bad conditions for up to 16 hours a day and then return to a dirty, stinky slum without running water or electricity, and who cannot provide for their children to go to school so they have to work or even beg. These children are not offered the opportunity of education. The cycle continues.
Jesus talks about two commandments – firstly to love God and secondly to love each other.
As a Christian – as a human being, as someone who has seen people living on the poverty line, as someone who has read stories of suffering, as someone who has seen children living in rubbish dumps in Africa, I have to say we need to care about the developing world.
How can we continue to go on our two or three week mission trips to poorer nations and come back only to live as we lived before? How can we continue to shop in places that clearly exploit people and prevent them from improving their living standards? How can we choose to buy cheap clothes without thinking about the impact this has on the people on the other end of the production line? As I write this I know this is as much about me as it as about anyone else. I feel my apathy, I feel my selfishness and consumerist mindset.
How can we? This is not meant to be a guilt trip, far from it. But we need to think about how we spend our money and what this means for the people in the developing world.
I dared to go where I had not gone before – I researched the shops I most regularly go to. I looked into whether or not they had signed up to various agreements to be more ethical and to engage with 
fair trade. There are some shops I will not be shopping in any more. There are some shops that are surprisingly ok. None of it is as good as buying with full on fair trade companies so I have ordered the catalogues; I am reading the online magazines about how to consume more ethically. I am pleased to report that as scary as it was to confront the fear that all the places I shop at would be unethical I found that was far from true. I continue to feel massively convicted that we in the West are so laid back about how our actions affect people in the developing world.
Jesus didn’t have to deal with a world that was massively globalised but I reckon he would have been fighting injustice with the best of them if he was here. I have been thinking about the parables about the talents – Matthew 25:14-30 – we have been given much so what are we going to do with the much that we have received?
Personally I have a massive heart for the developing world and I want to do more than sponsor a child in India, because to be honest that money is no great sacrifice for me. I want to live a life that reflects my values and I want to be willing for that to be uncomfortable and inconvenient. I have realised that even if this is a journey I take on my own, I need to do it.
There are so many different ways in which we can practically change our shopping habits so that they benefit people as opposed to cause them to continue to live in poverty.