Above is a video of some little tykes from a sanctuary for victims of the bush meat trade in Africa. Often people see the killing of these animals as the unfortunate result of poverty and war, but that is not always the case. Chimpanzees are not eaten by the poor, but instead by the rich: they are a delicacy, and the people who make a living off of the deaths of this endangered species are not usually trying to feed hungry children but are trying to fatten their wallets.


A lot of people on here are unaware of my undergraduate degree, which is in Physical Anthropology (minor in Psych). While I studied all the major areas, my particular interests in the field were primatology, evolutionary social science, and paleoanthropology.

I spent some time on an archaeological dig on a Seneca site in upstate New York, but I also spent a month in Costa Rica studying howler monkeys in the rain forest. I spent a brief period doing some conditioning of sibling gibbons (male and female) at the Pittsburgh Zoo who had arrived there after being caged up as "pets." They had, upon arrival, terrible psychological problems and would bang their heads off the pavement. Though, with loving-kindness from the zookeepers, they recovered well. I did this to help a grad student in her animal behavior research. I did not stay there long because it was such a pain to get there, only to spend about 20 minutes feeding grapes to apes for sitting in a tub. A piece of useless info: since gibbons are completely monogamous, they are not only the same size, but by all external appearances, have the same genitalia. The females have phallic pee-pees!

Anyway.

I remember the first time my sister and I played "school" in our dining room, and my assignment was to look up an animal and do a report on it. Now, this was even before I was even in school, so I had to have been four or five (I started school at 5). Well, I went straight to "monkey" in my encyclopedias and was hooked on primates from that day on.

Throughout my childhood, I switched about what I wanted to be: I wanted to be an archaeologist, a primatologist, a zookeeper (of primates), a writer (my first story was called "Mad Donna", about some girl named Donna that goes nutters and kills her family. I wrote that at the innocent age of six), a contemplative nun, a cop, and a Mexican hat dancer. Not in that order.

I am not sure exactly when my interest in primatology and paleoanthropology faded, but no doubt my trip to Costa Rica kind of did me in. Not only did I have a headache all the time, which was exacerbated by having to perpetually strain my neck while staring into the trees, but I also got pretty bored. Howler monkeys are extremely uneventful creatures. They travel from tree to tree, and then cop a squat and sleep half the day away, and once the awesomeness of seeing the monkeys in the wild backs off a bit and you are simply marking off the stats of mother-offspring proximity, it all turns very dry and mathematical. And since I barely eked out a C in statistics even though I studied it like mad, studying animal behavior lost its allure. It is a lot different in person than watching it in your living room with all the lulls in time edited out of the filming.

I wish I could re-capture the utter delight that I took in paleoanthropology. So much research has been done, that I am woefully behind in knowing any of it. And I have forgotten so much. I have already forgotten so much of what I've learned even at the Josephinum. It has been 10 years since my nose has been perpetually shoved into books about neanderthals.

My most challenging class in undergrad was an honors course in Evolutionary Anatomy. My professor, Dr. Shwartz, actually made an appearance in a documentary on the Discovery Channel during the time of the class, and I just happened to catch it. I asked him why he didn't tell us about it, and he just sort of shrugged and waved it off. Ah, I wanted to be a Dr. Schwartz! I only pulled a B+ in that class, but I wasn't too upset since I had never had an anatomy class before and so I had to learn both homo sapien anatomy in addition to the anatomy of all the australopithicines and other hominids.

The other person I wanted so much to be like was Dr. Gaulin. He was the only primatologist in the department, and so I clung to him. He thinks Dawkins is a god (pun intended), so I read a lot of Dawkins during those years. Being the exuberant little starry eyed monkey-lover that I was, he let me take classes that were only reserved for grad students (one of my classmates ended up being my husband's instructor). I think my lack of knowledge shown forth in the classes, though I somehow got A's in them.

My interests in Anthropology faded all around after I graduated. None of the graduate Anthropology programs really caught my eye, so I just worked at a bookstore until I figured out what I wanted to do. Then theology got a hold of me, and in hindsight, I realized that even my interest in primate behavior was related to my interest in humanity.

I think both my interest in evolution and theology relate to the same inner yearning: I want to know the first causes, the underlying workings of the universe, but even more so the fundamentals of what it means to be human. After working through these "deeper questions" about the Ultimate Concerns -- still with no definitive answer -- it is hard for me to be brought back down to the more "mundane" interests. Everything can be written off as "less important" than the Ultimate Concerns.

Yet, at the same time, the ultimate concerns that really matter in our everyday lives, are politics, economics, and similar areas of human relations, are too overwhelming and just upset me. Yes, I do have interests that encompass such things -- such as human rights, oppression, poverty, fair trade, etc. -- in the end these things cause me more heartache because they are more real. The pain of not knowing there is a God, however heart-wrenching the process may be, pales in comparison to knowing that the chocolate that fills essentially every shelf in America was harvested through the business of slavery. The former is big and great. The second is big and terrible. And both can drive me to the brink of insanity.

But anyway. This was one long ramble. Not sure why I started this post.

I really hate being ugly.

It is sometimes difficult for an average person to be friends with beautiful people.

Just sayin'.

http://www.satyamag.com/dec02/edit1.html

That chocolate you love so much may just have begun its journey to your mouth upon the backs of beaten slaves.

Slaves?, you ask. Yes; slavery is alive and well. There are currently over 27 million slaves in the world today. Many of them harvest one of your favorite things: cocoa.

Human trafficking is a common occurrence in western Africa, where human beings are bought to harvest cocoa. Often, if workers are not enslaved, they earn slave-wages and are still poverty-stricken and dependent on their employers. In either case, children are also forced to work in terrible conditions without education or medical care.

A large percentage of the world's cocoa comes from western Africa; it takes dedicated companies to invest in non-slave and non-slave-wage producers to make a difference. It takes YOU to tell them to make that difference.



Companies actively work to fight slavery in the cocoa trade and promote fair trade wages. They invest in their farming communities via improvement projects, education, and fair payment. How do YOUR usual companies measure up? Doing the research is worth it. Here is what you do:

Compose a letter to your company asking about its policy as to slavery and fair trade in the cocoa industry. Ask them to provide a list of their official criteria for their cocoa suppliers, and ask who their cocoa suppliers are. Find the suppliers. What are their criteria? This community is dedicated to doing that research.

To learn more about human trafficking, slavery, fair trade, and chocolate, visit the links below:

http://www.antislavery.org/
http://www.stopthetraffik.org/chocolatecampaign/
http://www.worldcocoafoundation.org/
http://www.cocoainitiative.org/
http://www.theamazingchange.com/
http://www.purefood.org/starbucks/chocolate.cfm

More information is easily acquired by Googling "slavery and chocolate," "cocoa slave," or "fair trade chocolate."

For a list of other Fair Trade Certified chocolate companies, click here:
http://www.transfairusa.org/content/certification/licensees2.php#cocoa

For some projects about slavery and cocoa, go here: http://www.cocoainitiative.org/pages/default.asp?idm1=64&idm2=89&pageid=89

Don't eat chocolate harvested by slave labor. Do the research. Most importantly: get the word out, and keep looking for opportunities to ACT!

So, it looks like I will be making a YouTube theology/Christian religion channel, where I will be doing some web lectures for my teaching class.  So, any suggestions on topics that would require lots of added diagrams, images, and video clips?

I was thinking of adding a little humor to it, as well.