The annual Ten Thousand Villages Thompson Festival Sale will be taking place over the next week-plus at Advent Lutheran Church on Thompson Drive North.
The event runs from Nov. 12-20, with fair trade goods for sale from 2 p.m. to 9 p.m. during the week and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturdays. As usual, the festival will take a break on Nov. 14, the only Sunday of this year's campaign. This is the 22nd year for the sale, and the second year it is being held at Advent Lutheran.
Furniture, kitchenware, linens, jewellery, toys, and home décor items will be among the fair trade items featured at the sale. Products sold by Ten Thousand Villages come primarily from developing countries, where the organization works with the unemployed and underemployed to provide them with a reasonable compensation for their work.
"Ten Thousand Village is a fair trade shopping place," explains organizer Bea Shantz. "It is the oldest fair trade retailer in North America. It gives the opportunity to shop for goods from around the world." Shantz notes that some of the Festival Sale's most reliable customers are immigrants who like being able to purchase authentic goods from their home countries, as well as travellers for whom it might not have been practical to bring many authentic goods back to Canada.
Ten Thousand Villages began as an offshoot of the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC). In 1946, MCC worker Edna Ruth Byler visited volunteers in Puerto Rico who were helping to lift women out of poverty by teaching them to sew. Byler brought several pieces of embroidery home with her to sell to friends and neighbours, and later expanded her line to include arts and crafts from Palestinians and Haitians. The line continued to expand, and in 1996, adopted the Ten Thousand Villages name. It remains part of the MCC.
"The artisan has already received full value for their work," says Shantz. Those workers in developing countries who produce goods for Ten Thousand Villages - known as artisans - are paid up front based on what the organization considers to be a fair price for the work the artisan put into it.
A portion of revenues from the sale will remain in Thompson to be invested back into the community. Shantz says that last year's recipients included the Our Home Kikinaw project as well as the youth drop-in centre run by Continental Missions, while groups such as the homeless shelter and the Thompson Crisis Centre have received donations in the past.
Thompson and Swan River are the only Manitoban communities currently taking part in annual festivals, though Ten Thousand Villages does maintain several stores in the southern part of the province.
