A Fair Trade Skit for Kids!

FIRST DAY

Two children, a boy and a girl, stand facing the audience. They are both twelve years old. MALICK, the boy, is from the Ivory Coast. SARAH is from Chicago.

Sarah: My family just moved to Chicago from North Carolina. This is my first day of school here. It’s freezing outside and the bus ride to my new school is going to take 45 minutes. I miss my friends back home already. I don’t want to be here.

Malick: The men brought me here last night. Today, they say, I start work. My uncle sold me to the men. He said he couldn’t keep me anymore, there wasn’t enough food. He didn’t want to do it. He said it’s better to work on the cocoa farms than be taken by the rebels in the north for their armies. I know he didn’t want to send me to the farms. I miss him already. I don’t want to be here.

Sarah: Wouldn’t you know it, my first day of school in Chicago and it’s Valentines Day. I totally forgot. Everyone’s running around giving each other cards and candy. I can’t even find my homeroom for all the crowds of kids hugging each other. I already saw one kid get dragged away for dressing like cupid and shooting people with little lollipop arrows.

Malick: There are many other boys here. Some of them look as young as my little cousin and he’s only eight. The older boys have machetes. They go from tree to tree lopping off the ripe cocoa pods. One of the boys tells me to grab the pods as they hit the ground. He says to take the pods and split them open with sticks so the jelly inside will dry and the seeds will ferment. “Watch me. If you don’t learn fast, you’ll be beaten,” he says. I have already seen one of the boys beaten, I think because he lost a machete.

Sarah: Five class periods before lunch and two of them are totally across the school from one another. I was late to my English class and the teacher was all snippy and said being new was no excuse for being tardy. She kind of got better, though. She passed around a bowl of chocolate and told us about the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.

Malick: I am so hungry. Some of the big boys passed around balls of foutou. You could tell they were old and I didn’t finish mine. One of the boys said that some days I would wish for the balls of cassava and plantain. When no one was looking, I went to a fermentation pile and dug out a cocoa seed that had dried in the sun. I put it in my mouth. It was bitter.

Sarah: Thank God for that chocolate Ms. Samuelson gave us. No matter what school you go to, the lunches are gross. Today was some kind of soy-meat hybrid burger. I could barely look at it. I saved a couple of pieces of chocolate in my bag from English class. I popped them in my mouth in the lunchroom. They melted over my tongue. I was so hungry they tasted especially sweet.

Malick: How many hours have I been working? It is starting to get dark. When do we stop?

Sarah: I missed the bus on the way home and have to wait twenty minutes for the next one. I almost fall asleep on the bus. It’s dark by the time I get home. It’s hard to be in a new place.

Malick: Finally we stop and I go to a hut to lie down with some other boys my age. For our day’s work we are paid with corn porridge. I am hungry and I eat it. I don’t like this new place.

Sarah and Malick (together): I feel like crying.

END