I was born in Australia but when I was three my parents returned to Italy hoping for a better future only to come back to Australia 12 years later.

I am not stranger to the difficulties encountered by migrants, the challenges of settling in a new country, the language barriers, the struggles of new networks, but once I started traveling the perception about this reality changed.

With each journey I became a bit wiser and with each journey I realized that somehow my every day choices had a direct impact on the wellbeing of other individuals around the world.

I set myself on a journey… In a world of mass consumerism and speed where many of us don’t even know half of where the ingredients of the products we find on our supermarkets shelves come from, we have no idea of what our clothes are made of and how they were made, and we take it for granted that what we have now will be here forever… I set myself on a journey.

I wanted to find out how that beautiful soft silk scarf wrapped around a mannequin on a window display and carrying a hefty price tag was actually made.

This mission took me to Laos. I heard that you could still find places where things were produced by hand using traditional methods so I wanted to see and discover with my own eyes, feel with my own hands. What I came across was much more than what I have ever expected.

Laos is a small country of only about six million people nestled between Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Myanmar, it is not surrounded by sea but is veined with rivers. When you cross the border to Laos by boat for the first time, you might think you are in a movie set. Houses on stilts made from wood and grasses, sometimes the stilts are the leftover metal bomb shells from the Vietnam war, wooden bridges, unsealed roads, rich red earth, rice fields, water buffalo, kids running around half naked occupy the landscape.

The journey began in Xieng Khoang North West of Vientiane near the Plain of Jars, in a small Fair Trade co-operative called Mulberries run by Kommaly Chanthavong. Here Kommaly awaits me… In her mid 60s, she spent the last forty years of her life encouraging villages in Laos to return to their traditional silk production and weaving using natural methods and under a fair trade model to ensure people get paid a fair prices, have decent working conditions, access to education and training, have a sustainable future, without Kommaly these people could have been manipulated

At the end, it wasn’t where the journey began or finished but the understanding that we have a responsibility as consumers to those that produce for us to make our lives so comfortable.

Once you come face to face with the people behind the products, once you see the effort, once you are invited in their humble homes and share a meal with them, you become realize we are all part of a global family and we have a responsibility to protect other human being and the planet we share.

I decided to set myself on another journey to raise awareness of a better way of doing things; this is when I set up Moral Fairground organising events and programs to promote fair and sustainable trading practices.