Freedom for former prostitutes in Kolkatta

I've mentioned earlier the work of Freeset in Kolkatta, India, who provide work for women who've been trapped in the sex trade.  They were featured on National Radio a couple of days ago!  Listen here to a half-hour interview with one of their Kiwi staff :-)


They're currently fundraising to buy a new building in order to considerably expand both the scope and depth of their work.  If you haven't already donated, please consider doing so.  They'll be purchasing the building at the end of this month, using a mix of donated money and loans, but the more they are able to pay up-front the better for them.

(NB They don't seem to be doing updating the 'thermometer' on the donations page very often - I heard from one of their founders today that they've currently raised 50% of what they need, not the 40% it says on the thermometer).

I did it!!!! Fair Trade white chocolate

Note: since I wrote this post I've learned more about making white chocolate.  See my update here.

As mentioned earlier, no one sells fair trade white chocolate in New Zealand.  Piko Wholefoods in Christchurch have, however, recently started selling fair trade cocoa butter.  My friend Anna bought some for me on a recent trip down there and on the weekend she came over to help me figure out how to turn it into white chocolate.

We didn't have a recipe to go on, so I decided to simply use 1:1:1 cocoa butter:milk powder:sugar - looking at the ingredients of Cadbury Dream white chocolate it seems that's more or less what they do.  The amount of vanilla was the same as what I used for the coconut butter white chocolate.

It worked really well!  It's not quite as smooth as the commercial stuff, but the flavour's pretty much perfect :-)  And, so long as you have a microwave and an electric spice grinder it's very easy to do.  It even works out at a similar price to non-fair trade white chocolate from the supermarket at around $1.60 per 100g.
 

Here's our recipe:

Ingredients:

• 60g cocoa butter
• 60g full-fat milk powder, ground at least 20 seconds in an electric spice grinder (if you don't do this your chocolate won't be really smooth, but if you beat really hard after step 2 it won't be too bad)
• seeds of half a vanilla bean
• 1/4 cup (60g) white sugar,  ground at least 20 seconds in an electric spice grinder (if can't do this, use sifted icing sugar and again beat really hard)

Method:

1. Chop cocoa butter and melt in the microwave (takes 3-5 minutes).
2. Mix in milk powder, then vanilla, then sugar.
3. Pour into a silicone loaf tin or molds and put in the fridge or freezer to firm up.  If making a chocolate bar, mark into squares with a blunt knife after 30-40 minutes in the fridge or 10-15 minutes in the freezer.  Be sure not to cut too deep (like I did) or your block will break up!

Gives 180g.

Below are some photos of the process.

Cocoa butter.  I'd never seen it before and I was surprised how strongly (and yummily) it smells. I'm storing it in the fridge in a well-sealed container so it doesn't lose that scent over time.

Melted cocoa butter.  I was surprised how yellow it was.  (And no, the jug isn't clean - it was too much hassle to clean it properly between test batches...)

This is how thick the mixture was after mixing unground milk powder into the melted cocoa butter.

But this was how runny it got after beating.  You can mix it by hand - I was just using a machine because I had it available.  I did it by hand on an earlier batch and it worked fine.

However, if you add ground milk powder into the melted cocoa butter it's much, much runnier.  This photo was taken after simply mixing milk powder into melted cocoa butter - no beating involved

And it's still pretty runny after adding the vanilla and ground sugar.

I've now got a fair trade white chocolate that's plenty good enough for me.  All I need to do, now, is figure out how to make a decent nutella substitute and there won't be any non-fair trade cocoa products I actually want that I'll have to do without :-)  I do still have two outstanding questions about the process, though:

1. Can I use vanilla essence?  I used actual vanilla in the recipe as people always fuss about chocolate seizing if you let any water near it, and I presume there's water (or alcohol, which is chemically very similar) in my essence.  However, I'm pretty clumsy so I've had a lot of experience exposing molten chocolate to water.  Generally nothing happens so I'm pretty skeptical about how readily seizing occurs.  Now that I'm confident of the process, I'll probably try a small batch with vanilla essence next time.
2. Can I use skim milk powder?  We always stock skim milk powder as I use it to make yoghurt or custard once or twice a week, but we usually don't have the full-fat stuff.  Cadbury's white chocolate contained 'milk solids' rather than 'skim milk solids', so I decided to use whole milk powder first.  Again, now that I'm confident I have a recipe that works, next time I want to try a small batch with skim milk powder and see if that tastes OK.

Update: see discussion on these questions in the comments, below.

Is there any point limiting one's personal carbon footprint?

I was recently asked what I thought of this:

...if you share my desperation and terror about this crisis, the urgent desire to do something, then limiting your personal carbon footprint should be very far from your main concern.  Like, it’s great if you can bike to work, and you should keep it up (fresh air and exercise and all).  But I’d say the anti-environmentalists are right that such voluntary steps are luxuries of the privileged, and will accordingly never add up to a hill of beans.  Let me go further: even to conceptualize this problem in terms of personal virtue and blame seems to me like a tragic mistake, one on which the environmentalists and their opponents colluded.

source

I think it's a really important question, so I thought I'd post my response here.

Raising the refugee quota

Currently New Zealand accepts 750 'quota refugees' every year - a number that hasn't increased since 1987.  That puts us at 90th in the world (per capita) for accepting refugees.

I'm increasingly seeing calls to increase this number, but those calls are often met by concern.  People worry whether this will increase unemployment in New Zealand, whether this influx will dilute our culture and even whether such refugees will bring the conflict they're fleeing with them.

That got me thinking: what proportion of those we grant residency to are actually refugees?  And who are the other people we let in?

Using data from pages 6-8 of the pdf in this file from the immigration department's website, I generated the following graph:

It turns out that people granted residency for refugee/humanitarian reasons are a tiny proportion of the total. Surely too tiny to have much impact on our culture or our job-market!  If we're concerned about the impacts immigrants have on those things, quota refugees aren't the problem.

If we'd like to basically retain the status quo, why not reduce the number of skilled migrants we bring in, rather than keeping the refugee quota static?  We could double the number of people accepted on humanitarian grounds to 6% without changing the total number of migrants: just offset them by reducing the number of skilled people we take in from 53% to 50% of the total.  I suspect that would hardly make a difference to the job-market, whilst having a huge impact on some very desperate people.

That still leaves the concern of whether more refugees will bring more conflict with them.  That's an understandable fear, but I think a largely groundless one.  I haven't looked into it, but I've rarely heard of conflict being introduced into New Zealand by refugees, so any increase would likely leave it at a very low level.

Notes:

1. You can see a spreadsheet with all the data used to generate the pie chart here.  The most processed data is at the top and as you go down you eventually reach the raw data.  Quite a few steps were involved in going from their numbers to my simple chart!
2. The categories on the pie chart are my own.  There are a truly surprising number of categories under which residency can be granted.  I have grouped them into ones that seemed to have a similar rationale behind them.
3. Refugee/humanitarian is broader than just quota refugees.  It also includes other categories that had 'refugee' in their title but didn't appear to be part of the quota, as well as the categories 'Victims of Domestic Violence' and 'Humanitarian'.
4. Family reasons is mostly foreign spouses of NZ citizens/residents or their children or parents.  This doesn't include refugee family reunifications - they're in the refugee/humanitarian category.
5. PAC/Samoan Quota is people from Tonga, Tuvalu, Kiribati and Samoa who can come in under quota schemes.
6. Skilled migrants/Talents/Employees includes not just skilled migrants but also people who come in with 'talents' in sports or arts and culture (!) or as employees (presumably being relocated from overseas).

Ethnographic photography

A good friend, Chris Joll, is an anthropologist working with Sufi Muslims in south and central Thailand.  In recent years he's begun documenting his work with amazing photographs that are now able to be seen on his website.

Over the last couple of weeks I've been browsing through the thousands of images he's uploaded.  I highly recommend doing the same, but if you don't have the time, I've posted my favourites below.  Click on the images to view bigger versions on Chris's website.

Enjoy!

Fundraising to set women free from prostitution in Kolkata

Freeset is a fair trade business offering employment to women trapped in Kolkata's sex trade. Currently they make quality jute bags and organic cotton T-shirts, but their real business is freedom!  They dream of seeing the 10,000 sex workers in their neighbourhood having the choice to leave a profession few of them ever chose to enter.

Right now they have the opportunity to come a step closer to that dream.  A large building at the entrance to the red light district where they work has come on the market.  If they could buy this building it could house more businesses giving opportunities for women to leave the sex trade along with social services to support them in this transition.

Right now they are fundraising to buy this building: it costs around NZ$3 million and is due to be sold at the end of June 2015.  After the sale they will need an additional NZ$900,000 to renovate it and establish the social services in the building.  They expect the businesses in it to be self-supporting (as their existing sewing business is) but obviously the social services won't generate funds so need this financial support.

If you'd like to support this project, you can read more and make donations here.

Onion skin dyeing

I first come across the idea of dyeing fabric with onion skins in one of my childhood favourite books, The Endless Steppe: an account of the Siberian exile of the author and her parents during WWII.  One way in which they made their hut there more cheerful was to dye their kitchen curtains with onion skins.  Earlier this year I decided to have a go myself, following these excellent instructions.

Over several months Martin and Sarah saved onion skins for me in order to get enough to largely fill our big preserving pot.

Boiling the skins to make dye

Filtering the skins out of the dye.  This was the most physically challenging part for me as it was hard to hold the muslin bag open at the same time as pouring liquid from the huge pot.

Two tea towels in the rich orange dye.  Isn't it a gorgeous colour?

Tea towels after boiling.  You can see I lost most of the water which led to uneven dyeing.  If I do this again I'll add more water to the dye before boiling.

Rinsing the dye out of the fabric.  I think this was the second rinse and there was still plenty of colour.

Drying the tea towels (and the muslin bag I'd used to separate out the onion skins).

The finished tea towels, complete with embroidered borders.  They turned out a lot more brown than I'd expected.  The dye is a bit uneven, but I'm still pleased with them.

The back side of the tea towels.  You can see that the synthetic labels on the towels (at bottom right) took up much more dye than the cotton fabric!