Off on the early train down to the Traidcraft office in Gateshead for our briefing day. We’re booked on their Meet The People trip to Bangladesh in March. We’d wanted to go on this trip last year, but it was a new venture and didn’t attract enough bookings, so we were pleased to see it confirmed for this year.

The day consisted of briefings about the trip and about Traidcraft, with a tour round Traidcraft’s operations, and a chance to meet the dozen or so people we’ll be travelling with. It was encouraging to realise we were towards the lower end of the age spectrum with most people retired, with a considerable amount of travel outside Europe already behind them, and with a strong commitment to Fairtrade (typically running Traidcraft stalls at their church – Fair Traders).

For us, this is a new departure in both senses of the word. Long haul air travel is massively destructive of the environment – with this trip producing 1.88 tonnes of CO2 each – and not something we would normally contemplate. However, Mel’s long term involvement with Fairtrade enables us to do this with a good-ish conscience, plus I’m hoping to meet the newly-appointed OpenOffice.org Marketing Contact for Bangladesh while I’m out there. So we neatly package up something for both of us.

There was also another twist to the day for us. Many years back, I’d seen Traidcraft advertising for an IT Manager, and we’d had some hard discussions at the time. We were comfortably settled in the Lune Valley, and the move would have meant uprooting the family to a less attractive part of the country and a not insignificant drop in income. So I didn’t apply. However, it was one of those crossroad moments when you wonder afterwards: what if?

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 14th, 2006 at 9:39 pm and is filed under Fairtrade, OpenOffice.org. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.