I've always thought I was a poor sweatshop-free consumer, buying mostly cheap brands that aren't big enough to use child labor anyways. I also thought I was totally environmental friendly, that materials used to make my clothes couldn't possibly pollute the environment the same way as cars do. However, I found I was dead wrong after this project!

I soon realized that one of the reasons why those brands were cheap was that they DID use child labor. It is hard to imagine a child younger than my sister working on a cotton farm for longer than my dad's shift, and to think that I support his/her misery by buying the brands I buy is quite depressing.

As a consumer in the First World, I am at least among the top 10% of the wealthiest people on the planet, exploiting the other 90% for my lifestyle. The stories of the aristocrats and the peasants during the French Revolution suddenly became extremely relevant to my life as countless parallels of my relationship with cotton farmers to the relationship between French aristocrats and French peasants stood out. It is unbelievable that I actually take part in the causes of Africans suffering on TV.

I already knew that I have contributed to the destruction of the environment even before being driven home for the first time from the hospital in a taxi, but my indirect impacts on the environment is more subtle and not as evident to me. Countless liters of oil and polluting chemicals were consumed just to make the material I am wearing, stitch it into a shirt, and transport it halfway across the globe to my local retail store. Apart from clothing, the very chair I am sitting upon, the foods I ate for supper last night, and the computer I used to painstakingly produce this project all endured through a similar process of polluting our precious earth.

Speaking of producing the project, the task of doing this project also allowed me to experience a small taste of what the child laborers go through everyday without end ever since they could remember. I had spent almost two weeks, working for at the very least seven hours a day (no exaggeration), staying up until 1 a.m. for this project. On one particular Saturday I even worked a total of twenty-four hours with only lunch and dinner breaks in between. This allowed me to feel what it feels like to work long hours like the laborers. However, I'm still missing the vitally tiring part, the laboring part. I often was exhausted after hours of work, but I was only typing on a computer or doing research, not laboring for a boss who would constantly abuse me and shout at me to work quicker, nor having meals lacking in nutrients at the end of the day.

This project allowed me to become more aware of my global impact as a consumer, realizing my impact on the environment and other people in the world. Surely my self-image of sweat-shop freeness and environmentally friendliness is now forever gone.