I’m crossposting this from my blog at ryandecorso.us<\/p>\n

I\u2019d really appreciate it if you guys read this-<\/p>\n

I\u2019m in Puno, Peru. It\u2019s one of the poorest cities in the nation. Yesterday, an older woman was nearly begging us to buy a hat from her, which was handmade from alpaca yarn for only S\/7, or USD $2.80. We paid her 4USD and she was incredibly happy that we offered more than she had. We don\u2019t need another hat, but it really made this old woman\u2019s night, she was almost crying asking us to buy it.<\/p>\n

I can tell when these things are a ruse or less-than-true, that\u2019s not the case here. The same thing happened to me yesterday with a woman and her child trying to sell me a pack of gum. She only had about $2.50USD worth of candy in her tray\u2013most other places people have a lot of merchandise, probably more like $30USD. It\u2019s not a side job, or something to do during the day, trying to turn a dime profit on a piece of candy or selling a hat you spent hours knitting for less than $3USD is these people\u2019s main source of income. And you could easily go days without selling anything in this saturated market. There\u2019s hardly any tourists here.<\/p>\n

If anyone is interested, you can send me money and I\u2019ll go out into the city of Puno, buy something for you, and ensure that the money makes it to a person who really needs it. You win, because you\u2019ll get a quality hat that\u2019s worth far more than it costs, and it really does make these people\u2019s days. Or if you want, I could take the hat and donate it to someone else who needs it down the line. Or I could look for something else, it\u2019s really up to you.<\/p>\n

This is as fair-trade as you could ever get\u2013there is no middle man, the money goes directly into the hands of people who desperately need it. Contact me anyway you\u2019d like to arrange something, or donate money via Paypal button on the side of my blog, or the bottom of my website.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m crossposting this from my blog at ryandecorso.us I\u2019d really appreciate it if you guys read this- I\u2019m in Puno, Peru. It\u2019s one of the poorest cities in the nation. Yesterday, an older woman was nearly begging us to buy a hat from her, which was handmade from alpaca yarn for only S\/7, or USD… Continue reading On Fair Trade, Buying Hats, and Helping People Who Really Need Help<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1733","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-about-us","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebluevan.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1733","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebluevan.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebluevan.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebluevan.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebluevan.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1733"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebluevan.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1733\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1735,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebluevan.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1733\/revisions\/1735"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebluevan.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebluevan.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebluevan.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}