I love to boycott

I don't think I boycott a lot of things, I just think it's important to realize that how you spend your money is a lot like voting. If everyone buys a certain product it will not only be deemed as the best, it will also be advertised as such in order to attract other customers. With this in mind I am conscious that people are interested in what I buy. Since I did a hippy degree where every third person had dreads and we lost part of the class to a Greenpeace boat that set sail at the end of the first year (well one fruitarian who had added an 'O' to the end of his name to sound Spanish) i took up a lot more boycotts at University. This has resulted in me becoming a 29 year old who totally avoids certain shops and supermarket isles only to wonder if things have changed and I should be now buying these products in large volumes in aid of letting the company know I full-heartidly agree with their reform. If I don't, how will they ever know I was boycotting them? So on my year travelling i vowed to check up on the status' of them, as lets face it, it doesnt make life any easier. Below is a list of my beloved boycotts:

McDonald's- one of my first. Not only did they use polystyrene boxes for their burgers, they also sacked people who turned 18 and qualified for the minimum wage. This was witnessed first hand one summer when I made my fortune in my silver DM's sprayed black and a classy looking baseball cap in Gatwick Airport (south airside) McDonald's.

Gap - we all knew they used sweatshops and still they charged the earth.

North sea fish/any fish - it's unsustainable and reduces fish stocks that might never recover.

Nestle- my favourite, 'the baby killers', Nestle advertised powdered milk formulas to third world mothers in such an aggressive manner that many mothers bought it believing it to be the best start for their child, only for the combination of weak powder ( to make it last longer) and terrible water sources to kill the baby before it could even write a letter of complaint. This boycott also extends to every company that is owned by Nestle (which is about a third of the world) ( Rowntree's, L'oreal, Branston Pickle, Nescafe, Perrier, Nesquick, shredded wheat, yorkie and Felix, to name a few)

Starbucks- my most flippant. The idea was to boycott multinational companies (but this was the only one to make it onto my list!) as they were making local business's miss out. I have definitely retracted this one as the value of having a weak, syrupy coffee which tastes the same no matter what country you are in is, well, invaluable.

Battery Farmed chicken/eggs- not very glamorous, and hard to work out, but trying to avoid all chicken products that do not give the bird the quality of life i believe they deserve is still standing. However, oddly enough this standard does not apply to all animal life? I agree in principle that all animals i eat need to have been happy once, however how do you ascertain this? Is there a happy cow label?

Apple- they are just too smarmy for their own good. But then my alternative MP3 player broke and my I-Pod won my heart.

Australia - As you might know, Australia had a 'White Australia' policy for years and it wasn't until the 1980's sometime when black people were allowed to move to Australia.

So this weeks task is to work out if i should continue, or reinstate any of these! Is this a bit too much like moaning for you?

Could this be a budget cut?

At my time working for the council i realise that much money is lost through bureaucracy and protocol (usually put under the heading 'their rights' and used in regards to poor people), but just this week i came across the funniest waste of money ever. Coming from a background where you are expected to look after yourself (indeed i had my first job at 13 laying tables in an expensive hotel), i still cant get used to the reflection of this in the section of society that inverts my desire to look after myself by expecting the government to help them out with anything they need. Below is the best example (and true!) that i can find:

Sandy (14) and her unemployed mum live in a council house. They both receive disability allowance (£600 a month) along with job seekers, housing benefit, and child tax credit. Despite proclaiming to me, 'oh, we are clinical about our cleanliness', the house is so dirty that it needs industrial cleaning, and yes, the council pay for this, despite it being their dirt and lack of cleaning. However, the house is so bad that Sandy and her mum have to be put up in a B&B at the councils expense during this time. Alas they also have a dog, so he is sent to kennels- fully paid for the duration. On the day the family are due to return, they refuse to re-reside in their council house as they claim it is a health hazard- lets just revisit who made this mess -them. After much mobile phone chat backwards and forwards over a few weeks, after all none of this is inconveniencing them, it is decided that they must let the fumigators in, and then negotiate with them about what rotten furniture may remain and what must be thrown. In the end, negotiations were called off and everything was thrown away. So after a few more months of delay and negotiations about various minor issues, the family have been found a new, CLEAN house, with new furniture paid for by charities and the council.

So yes, these wastes of money happen everyday, what doesn't happen everyday, and led me to write this, is that whilst they lived in a B&B at the tax payers expense due to making their own house uninhabitable, and their dog was in kennels due to the B&B's rules, and despite them still receiving more in benefits that i do in salary- we paid for travel warrants (tickets) for them to go and visit their dog!!! How many visits does the council think is appropriate for this? I think none. Sorry dog. Not unless they want to use their easily waited for money to do it.

I've had it with this place

I'm fed up with work. Sometimes it seems that all my job is is to write down bad things that are happening to children. Sometimes once I've written these things down, we will all have a meeting and agree that these things are bad. Sometimes after these meetings we will come up with a plan to talk to someone about something in the hope that these bad incidences might reduce. But really all i seem to do is keep lists of bad things happening to really quite nice kids.

In this country a child cannot be removed from their parents until something really bad has actually happened to them. And this i understand as the incident has to stand up in the court of law. However, this can result in unhappy and unsteady situations continuing in terrible conditions until an ultimate bad thing will give social services the power to remove a child. In Australia you can remove a child if there is strong evidence that significant harm will happen to the child. Here we literally wait for SIGNIFICANT harm to happen to a child before we will consider removing it.

Similarly, if the parent is doing very little for the child, or is emotionally abusive but the child is not deemed to be being harmed significantly, ie not being sent to school and being out down all the time is not significant abuse, then they will continue on a Child Protection Plan for at least 2 years before a consideration for removal will be given, at this time then, the point will be considered that the child has now adapted in these two years and will no longer engage with social workers, nor is capable of significant change due to over two entrenched years of this living, so the situation continues. Where is the hope?

Do we hope for the harm or do we hope for the adaptation? Either way the out come is a significantly harmed adolescent.

Do they know its my towel set they are eating?

Since we've been back from travelling i feel like a millionaire. This is mostly because i now realise that i no longer have to save every month for travelling and less to do with actually having the money.

In combination with this, and my increased world awareness through being able to access the news on a daily basis recently; (In fact sometimes the news seems like a relief from my overly depressing job.) I am now unfortunately aware of the massive and overwhelming drought in East Africa (perhaps the worst for 60 years). Now i studied development studies in order to change the world, i learnt a lot during my time but really all it did was politicise everything and make even the most basic things, like a right to water, a battlefield of characters so self important and crucial to the world, that choosing anyone to champion change would also result in utter destruction for everyone or everything else.

But what to do about these poor starving people? Politic agendas and long term solutions aside, i just want to put my life on hold, fly out there and get a truck to drive them all to those crappy refuge camps. Its hard to comprehend the desperation of these people to walk 7 days without food and water with a final destination which uncannily resembles Glastonbury festival permanently existing with all those pill-poppers and partiers hemmed in by large metal fences and no flushing toilets, hand washing facilities and all there is to do is sit in piles of dirt and rubbish and wait for the unsanitary conditions and lack of food to eat you alive. In June up to 30,000 people were arriving at these refugee camps a week, and queuing to get in. These people are desperate to get into these fetid conditions because they are better than where they live with no rain.

I desperately want to help- but how much so you ask? Well, i feel like i should give every penny i have to them (mortgage and bills excluded) and perhaps that will buy my soul some peace. This would also mean a sacrifice of my longed for matching towel set (white for Xss and Grey for me): Which i can live with, well without. But this sacrifice seems silly as i will simply use next months pay to get them, and then feel bad; which is what led to many a ridiculous situation before we went travelling where i never buy said item at all, because i feel so bad that i can live such a stupidly privileged life that i do that i can buy things that match when i have perfectly functioning items already. So should i just never buy them, or buy them now with the starving peoples money? The end result is the same.

I guess one solution is to get my friends (say 4 of them with £11 each) to buy these new towels for me, and then i will have not wasted any money on them. But then again, if i have the power to convince my friends to give money away, i really should be encouraging them to give it to a charity that benefits the famine victims.

So as always, i wont buy them, I'll wait for some 'bonus' money to come along that cannot be given to charity for some bizarre reason. The money i am giving is going to either the Red Cross or the DEC, both of whom are great at getting the infrastructures set up very quickly and providing immediate relief for these people for whom each day counts. My towels can wait. Think about if you can spare any money, it really will save lives.