In October FairMail was featured in five episodes of the Belgian children’s television program “Eerlijk Waar”. The four week series on the commercial VTM channel told the story behind 8 different fair trade products ranging from cacao to bananas and from oranges to flowers. Of course FairMail’s fair trade greeting cards couldn’t be left out!
The main star in the episodes about FairMail is 17 year old Yomira. Belgian TV presenter Arne runs into Yomira while looking for the beach chairs featured in the FairMail card he bought in Belgium. After explaining him about FairMail Yomira teaches Arne some lessons on photography and takes him on photography shoots in the area. Afterwards Arne wants to visit Yomira’s house and the garbage belt where she worked with her grandmother before she entered FairMail. This desolate places leaves a big impression on the presenter and only makes him more impressed about what Yomira has achieved so far.
Below you can view some of the episodes featuring FairMail in combination with a visit to a fair trade orange farm in Southern Africa.
With a personal motivation letter and an interview (partly in English!) the Peruvian FairMail teenagers are trying to get selected for FairMail’s European promotional tour between the 17th and 30th of June 2015. Wow they are so excited, this will be the trip of their life! So far their imagination only goes as far as the excitement of sitting in an airplane for the first time.
The goal of their trip will be to conduct market research on “their” greeting card market and promote the unique story behind their photographs to as many people as possible in the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium.
If you have a nice idea for the program of their visit, now is the time to let us know!
To get some inspiration here are some possible ideas:
Ready for the auction
* Organizing a photography exhibition or auction in a gallery you know.
* Visiting a local high school for a cultural exchange with European students of their age.
* Presenting themselves and FairMail to a group of fair trade volunteers.
* Giving a photography workshop.
* Meeting with a professional photographer.
* Selling their cards at a cool cultural or music festival.
* Giving interviews to journalists or for television.
* Present themselves to organisations that might want to purchase their photos in the future.
* Or any other thing you can think of that would help them understand their customers, how fair trade works in Europe or allows them to tell the story behind FairMail’s cards.
meeting clients
At this stage we appreciate any ideas you may have. Please feel free to send them to us by clicking here.
In the beginning of January we will make a selection of all the ideas and try to make a more definite program. We will be sure to keep you informed on how and where you can meet the FairMail teenagers in Europe!
Mariaflor (r) after the ceremony with her friend Cinthia
We are very proud of the fact that FairMail Peru photographer Mariaflor was awarded with the prize for being the best student of her faculty over the past semester. As special as this news sounds, it is actually already the third time that Mariaflor, who is 23 years old by now, managed to achieve this!
With her hard work when she was still taking pictures for FairMail she already earned 7.379 euro. Money which she is investing to study communication sciences at the Cesar Vallejo private university in Trujillo. With her first prize she won a scholarship which means she has to pay only 45 euro per month instead of 110 euro. A discount that is more than welcome to allow Mariaflor to have enough funds to finish her career at the expensive private university. Her mother was present during the award ceremony at the university. According to Mariaflor, her mother says she is proud to have a daughter like Mariaflor. And we are very proud to have a FairMail teenager like her!
It comes as no surprise that Mariaflor works very hard to achieve this incredible result. She understand and fully makes use of this chance to get ahead in life. Therefor she spends an average of more than 50 hours per week on her study.
Can you believe she even manages to combine all that hard work with her part-time job as co-manager of FairMail Peru? She doesn’t make a big deal of this herself. She just points out the unique opportunity she is grasping to be able to practice what she learns at university, while getting paid job experience at the same time.
Her next goal is to specialize her career abroad as this increases opportunities for finding a job afterwards. If anybody has an idea for an organisation where Mariaflor can do her practical period abroad, please let us know. They won’t regret working with a smart and ambitious girl like Mariaflor!
We have a lot of faith that Mariaflor will achieve this and are very grateful to have such a lighting example for the new generation of FairMail teenagers in our Peruvian team!
How about hiking to a bright blue glacier lake at the foot of the 6768 meter high Nevado Huascaran, the second highest mountain of South America? Or bathing under the 771 meter high Gocta waterfall, the third highest waterfall in the world?
These are just two of the activities during FairMail’s 4 new photography trips to Peru. Besides visiting beautiful off the beaten track destinations, the FairMail photography trips are unique because you get to travel together with FairMail’s teenage photographers! Together you share the joy of taking pictures. By travelling with the teenagers you don’t feel like a tourist at all and you can make deeper contact with the locals. For the teenagers it is an opportunity to hear directly from potential customers what kind of pictures people in the west like.
Below you can find an overview of the 4 upcoming trips that we have planned, starting at 650 euro for 11 days, all included.
Below you can view the episode with English subtitles.
Would you like the teenagers to make pictures for your employer’s Christmas cards? And at the same time have the chance to win a photography trip in Peru for you and a friend? Then click here and see how you can win.
In August 5 Peruvian FairMail teenagers travelled with 5 foreign photography amateurs high into the Peruvian cloud forest. Besides taking pictures for the new FairMail cards, their goal was to learn more about the route an organic coffee bean takes from the field to the cup.
To do so we started in the tiny rural village of Sicches near the border with Ecuador. This little town, situated on the humid side of the Andes, is inhabited by farmers who are members of a fair trade coffee coop.
By staying with these farmers for a couple of days the teenagers learned not only about the coffee chain but also about how their fellow countrymen and -women live in a very different environment than the teenagers themselves are used to. After a few days of coffee harvesting, photo shooting and sugar cane cutting, the trip continued to the coffee processing plant. There the teenagers learned about the final stages of production before the coffee is exported to Europe.
If you fancy travelling with the teenagers on one of their next trips click here or come to the next information session on the 8th of November 2014 in Rosmalen, The Netherlands. To register or for more information about the information session please click here.
We are thrilled to announce that the FairMail team in Peru has 2 new members: Bryan (14) and Dante (13). Together with 2 other girls they started their one month trial period in June.
These 4 teenagers were put forward by our local partners Mundo de Niños, Milagro School and LitClub Cerrito de la Virgen. The idea of the trial period is to give the candidates the opportunity during one month to find out if they are really interested to learn about photography. Plus to show us their motivation for school, responsibility in handling our cameras, their punctuality, honesty and good companionship.
After a couple of weeks one of the two girls came to the conclusion it would be difficult to combine her school work, current activities for the LitClub and Milagro school with her new activities for FairMail. This was unfortunate for FairMail as we did see quite some photography talent in her. But at the same time we respected her responsible and realistic decision.
New FairMail teenager Bryan
After the first month Bryan and Dante impressed us most with their responsibility and motivation. Both also fitted in very nicely with the other current teenagers so we decided to give them the opportunity to become a permanent member of FairMail Peru. Yeah! You can read more about Bryan and Dante on their personal profile pages. We wish them a lot of luck with their new part-time career as photographers and hope to present their first FairMail cards to you very soon!
The fourth candidate didn’t manage to convince us during the first month so we decided to give her a second and last chance. She told us she really liked photography and wanted to be part of FairMail so we gave her one more month to show that to us. Unfortunately during that period she was not able to stick to the general FairMail rules and was not offered a participation contract.
Dante in action
With Bryan and Dante joining the team there are currently 27 teenagers who offer their pictures through FairMail in Peru and 52 in total (including India and Morocco). By the end of the year we hope to fill 2 more vacancies.
The great thing about FairMail is that it allows our teenagers to transform the free resource of local beauty into money to pay for their own education. During four “Garbage Art” workshops we went one step further, transforming garbage collected during clean-ups into large scale works of art. Some pictures of the art work will be available on new FairMail cards soon.
The workshops were inspired by the Brazilian artist Vik Muniz and his Waste Land project at Brazil’s largest garbage dump on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. After seeing his work the FairMail teenagers in Peru and India developed their own ideas for huge works of art made from garbage.
FairMail India team collecting garbage
To make the garbage art suitable for FairMail cards we gave it a little FairMail twist, using greeting card themes like “Good trip”, “Freedom”, “Thank you” and “Get well soon”. With the whole team we headed out into the Nagwa slum and along Huanchaco’s polluted beach to collect garbage in the necessary colours to actually make the art work.
Below you can see the end result and “Making of” time lapse videos of the four groups of FairMail teenagers: “Los 5 artistas”, “The photo Ninja’s”, “los Wheels” and “Los Genios”.
Thanks to FairMail volunteers Julian, Jessica, Michael and Samantha who organized and helped out during the workshops.
FairMail’s goal is to impact teenager’s lives through the art of photography. Never before though did just one photograph have such a big impact on the life of a teenager as with this photo taken by FairMail Peru photographer Yomira (17). In November her photo was selected by a big Dutch college for their corporate Christmas cards. Five months later the full impact on Yomira’s life becomes clear. She is now on her way to be the first in her family to go to university.
Problems at home
Until November Yomira’s perspectives weren’t very bright. Although she had managed to finish her high school with the help of her FairMail earnings she was running short to be able to finance her dream of studying business administration. Also she had serious problems at home and with her boyfriend. We were quite worried about Yomira’s situation and if she would be strong enough to stay on the right path.
Record earnings
Yomira in front of her pre-university institute
Things changed when FairMail’s profit results for the 4th quarter were announced. She had earned the record amount of 4.500 soles (1.200 euro), mainly due to the sale of her picture on ROC Aventus College’s corporate Christmas card. Suddenly she had enough money to prepare herself for the university admission exam at one of the best private training institutes. Preparing for university admission in a private institute is essential in Peru as the level of public high school education is not sufficient. Plus the entry exams are very competitive with only 5% of the applicants being admitted for some courses.
From dream to reality
Yomira seems to be quite happy studying at the institute. It is a totally different world than Peru’s public schools as the teachers use better teaching methods, are more patient and are able to explain more about the subjects, according to Yomira. But it is also quite exciting as now, after talking and dreaming about it for years, she is at the point of taking action to make her dream turn into reality. But what a great opportunity it is to become the first in her family to continue studying after finishing high school. Not many teenagers in her surrounding have that opportunity!
Still it is a big challenge for Yomira. She was a bit scared about how difficult and competitive it would be. She is expected to study 45 hours per week at the institute and has about 4 hours of homework per day! It is also difficult for her that she doesn’t know anybody as none of her high school friends were able to go with her. She says she still doesn’t have much new friends but she enjoys learning new things and achieve her goals this way.
A chance of 1 in 13
Yomira studying at her new institute
Preparing herself for the university admission exam costs about 2.000 soles (about 550 euro). In September she hopes to be ready for the entry exam for the UNT (National University of Trujillo) to study accountancy. The battle will be tough though with about 400 candidates for only 30 seats. Even if she doesn’t make it in the first go she is determined to keep trying and give it a second shot if necessary.
Yomira wishes to thank all the people who bought her pictures and cards. And adds that if anyone has any tips or suggestions about the kind of photos they would like to see on FairMail cards,to please let her know.
The picture that changed her life is also available on a normal FairMail card and a best seller in Germany. Want to stock up on your Christmas cards early this year, then order here?
New on FairMail’s website are the personal video profiles of our teenage photographers in which they introduce themselves and talk about their aspirations.
Here, besides watching the videos, you can also read about their earnings, what they have spent their money on so far, send them an email, connect to their facebook, view their pictures and of course buy their cards!
It has never been easier to be in touch with your fair trade producer, this way giving FairMail’s social impact 50 faces!
