One in a million

This is the Africa corner in the shop that I work in. :-)

I am now working at the marketplace at Crossroads Foundation. This is a shop that sells all kinds of fair trade stuff. The shop is a really cool place with all the products and the decoration. This Monday I brought some friends over and I am very glad that they like it!

Different parts of the shop are decorated as different continents accorrding to the products in that specific area. The left one above is the silk road and the right one is central/south America. We have goods from China, India and Cambodia of course but also a lot of cool stuff from Israel, Kenya and places that I did not even hear of. I must confess that I am not very familiar with the products yet, but the product variety is so wide that I can discover new things everytime I explore the store.

We even have spices! And I really like the butterflies ornament near the cashier. In the background is our best-selling item - CHOCOLATE. The chocolate is really good! I have tried the 70% dark chocolate, fruit and nut dark chocolate and white chocolate with strawberry. :-) Fair trade stuff does not necessarily mean expensive stuff, but the truth is - things we have are usually with a higher price comparing with non-fair trade stuff.

My job duties... Last two weeks I spent a lot of time with another girl who works there tidying things up. We also have to organize things into different cupboards and store rooms. We did a lot of sorting...which was really boring and sometimes, meaningless. Luckily, we have some more important responsibilities after the manual labour duties. I made the X'mas gift catalogue for the staff last week and I have some research for personal care products to do and some guidelines documents to write in the coming weeks.

People here are all very nice. I feel warm when I see people smiling at me and saying 'Hello!', even though they do not know me at all. I was quite nervous when I told them I had to leave early for the summer camp because I dont want to cause anybody any trouble. Instead of telling me that I am an irresponsible person, they encourage me to do whatever I want and whatever reasonable to Crossroads. I really appreciate their generosity and kindness to all interns. It makes me more willing to come back even after my internship and this summer. :-)

In three week's time, I will have to leave early for the Cosmo summer camp. But I will have to come back to finish my internship hours. Though I like the shop a lot, I'd prefer working in the office with Josh to do the research and all the writing stuff when I come back...