Marketplace (American Public Media) broadcast a very personal story about Ms. Vicki, one of seven recyclers from Mexico who lived and worked and ate and slept beside Good Point Recycling staff in Middlebury.
Yesterday, NPR's Living On Earth reporter did a story about her 5 days at Retroworks de Mexico.
People are calling to offer financial assistance, one person has offered to purchase solar electric panels for the factory in Mexico.
If you want to meet the ladies yourself, we don't have very good quality film, but we are really happy with our experience hiring Ken French to edit what we had of Africa and Asia film into a short documentary, and when we get some income we'd like to do the same with Las Chicas Bravas (the tough gals). Here's a brief shot of Lidia and Dolores cutting up with Dale and Jimmy in our Middlebury warehouse.
We really want this to work out. The problem with all the Greenpeace anti-export videos are that the people they are filming would be poorer without the e-scrap. It's like filming desperate coffee farmers and then running a tagline "Help these farmers. Boycott coffee". What we need is hands on action. If people in the USA are afraid of corruption in Mexico, they should meet the Retroworks de Mexico women's coop. This is about living wages, working standards. And the cooperativa co-owns the profits.
Here is some film of our training and an interview with the TV repair and resale technician (in Spanish). We have hours of footage, maybe we can find someone to finance another round of edits.
We have longer and more boring film of the women working in Middlebury. We also have film of the ladies training beside Mr. Frederic Fahiri Somda, from Burkina Faso, who is a lawyer now living in Canada, and an expert in Basel Convention law and the laws of Africa. I will write up something all about him another time. It was a hoot cooking and translating and working together, the Mexicans, the Africans, the South Americans, Tito Santiago and me in 2008.
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