On the flight from Frankfurt to Burkina Faso, a sense of respect crept over my mind for what awaited me in one of the poorest countries in the world. Arriving in Ouagadougou, we traveled east after a short night to the cotton fields. The people here are dependent upon the “white gold”. I had many encounters on that day: with the farmers, with the international development group Helvetas,with my colleagues, and, most of all, with the children of the farmers.

Inviting me into their classrooms, my eyes naturally sought out kids of the same age as my seven year old daughter, Hannah. Our interpreter translated my questions and the answers of the children back and forth. There I stood, a 6’2″ tall businessman from Germany, feeling uncomfortable and out of place. The children seemed to feel similarly; they had respect for the man in front of them.

My thought was, “You have to wade out into the midst of that”. My digital camera helped me out. I took photos of the kids and we looked at them together.

And then it came – the same feeling that I had at my daughter’s baptism. 20 children on and around me, uninhibitedly curious and vibrantly alive. 20 children who are a part of the shared future of our world. 20 poor children, but more content and healthier than children in other parts of Africa because their parents are cotton farmers.

Despite, or perhaps even because of their poverty, the children radiate the same dignity as their parents. The dignity of human beings who can provide for themselves, and the dignity of children who are able to go to school at the beginning of their path through life, and who must not suffer from hunger.

These are the moments when I realize how much I dearly love my work, and how wonderfully unusable I have become for the common corporate “rat-race”. A T-Shirt made from organic cotton saves 63 square feet of farmland. Every year, 2.4 billion T-Shirts are manufactured. Organic cotton’s part in all this still constitutes less than 1% worldwide. There is still a lot to do.

On the flight home, I decided to bring my own children, Hannah and Vincent, with me someday.

Tags: Burkina Faso, organic cotton, organic farming

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 9th, 2009 at 8:10 am and is filed under Environment, Material, Production, Projects, Social responsibility. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.