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This post is our contribution to Blog Action Day, which brings together thousands of bloggers to write about one topic for a single day. This year's topic is poverty.A friend of mine, Ilan Shwartz, took a trip to South Africa a few years ago to volunteer at a place called the Hillcrest AIDS Centre. Hillcrest provides medical services, education/awareness, emergency food parcels, sustainable agricultural development, and income generation programs for people in an area where the unemployment rate and the rate of HIV/AIDS infections are both over 40% of the population. The number of people there infected by HIV grows by over 500,000 every year. That number is almost the population of Winnipeg (the hometown of Dojo Learning).
When Ilan came back to Winnipeg, he brought with him a few dozen small beaded pins called "little travellers" which were sold at Hillcrest as souvenirs, as part of their income generation program. When people here started expressing a desire to have one of the little travellers for themselves, Ilan started selling the pins here like they were back at Hillcrest.
Things started to pick up quickly, and so Ilan organized a group of volunteers under the name "Little Travellers" (originally the "Simunye Initiative") to promote the pins at local events and find local stores to carry them. Fast forwarding to present, the Little Travellers are now in cities across Canada, and have started spreading into the US and as far as South Korea. To date, the Little Travellers HIV/AIDS Initiative has sold over 30,000 pins, raised over $150,000, and have been endorsed by Stephen Lewis, the former U.N. Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa.
Each doll is hand-made by women affected by HIV/AIDS, and 100% of the proceeds go to help fight HIV/AIDS and to provide an income source to the families of those who are affected. In addition to all of the services provided by Hillcrest, the sale of Little Travellers provides an income to more than 100 families affected by HIV/AIDS in one of the most impoverished areas of South Africa.
Please take a moment to check out the Little Travellers website, read the stories of some of the crafters who make the little travellers, and buy a few for your friends and family. At only $5 each, a little goes a long way.
"By making these dolls, families have been fed, lights have been turned on, little children have gone to school, water has poured out taps... but most of all, hope has been restored."
– Paula Thompson, Woza Moya income-generation project, Hillcrest AIDS Centre
