Life has a way of getting ahead of me and months go by and suddenly when the house is quite it hits me, “What happened? How is it almost summer? Where did the time go?” Poof! Time sometimes vanishes right before my eyes. This has been the case for the past 10 weeks. I’m not sure how I got here – but a lot of life has happened and I am just taking time to look back, breath in the present, and look forward to the future. My fellow abolitionist mamas and I have been very active this past few months hosting an events in March on chocolate and how it relates to modern day slavery; In April we hosted the organization Falling Whistles highlighting the war in Congo and its relationship to us; And in May we hosted a Fair Trade event. Currently we are gearing up for an event in June where we will introduce local efforts in raising funds for Love 146 (www.love146.org) through its Tread on Trafficking campaign. In this post, I want to highlight a few pieces of information regarding the subject of conflict minerals and shortly I will add a couple more posts to highlight the other subjects. For now – Conflict Minerals 101
Conflict Minerals: The basics
There are four main minerals mined in Congo that everyone wants: tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold. The majority of these minerals eventually end up in the electronics we use such as our cell phones and computers. There are many different armed militia groups who use mass rape as a deliberate strategy to intimidate and control the local people in Congo in order to secure control of the mines and trading routes. Due to the lack of transparency in the supply chain, we the consumers, have no way of knowing if we are inadvertently financing the armed groups that are forcing children to fight in the militia groups that regularly committing mass rapes of innocent civilians.
Check out this short video put out by the Enough Campaign (www.enoughproject.org). I have found the Enough Campaign a great resource for understanding this issue.
If you would like to learn more, I would recommend reading this document: http://www.enoughproject.org/publications/mine-mobile-phone?page=1