Maya: I want you to imagine being in your favorite store,
picking up your favorite beauty product.
Now how many of us take the time
to actually think about where these products are coming from.
I had the opportunity to find out.
Beauty brand Alaffia reached out to myself
and my homegirl HeyFranHey and Jouelzy and Gangstarr Girl
asking us to share their stories with you, my beautiful boos.
I discovered firsthand what real fair trade looks like,
by traveling to the Mother Land, West Africa --
Ghana and Togo to be exact.
And I will tell you right now,
this was a life-changing experience
as you're going to see in this video.
♪ ♪
Maya: We in the Mother Land!
Fran: M'wah!
Maya: We're headed to Togo,
and where we need to go is going to take us two days.
I'm excited, the adventures await us.
♪ ♪
This is where we're staying. This is so legit!
We're only here for one night,
and then we leave in the morning,
and then we drive six hours more.
♪ ♪
Good morning. We're in our little huts.
I'm with my roomie. my little hut roomie
.
Look at that.
Female: Alaffia!
Maya: We're here having breakfast in Togo,
we're going to leave,
we're going to do a six hour road trip up north.
How many hours do we have left?
- Four. - Four hours left.
♪ ♪
We're here on the Alaffia property, it's night though.
♪ ♪
Maya: And where are we going?
Male: Alaffia Village, where we make all the shea butter.
Maya: The heart and soul. Male: Yep, the heart and soul.
Fran: You know I'm happy.
♪ ♪
We're here at Alaffia Village.
[traditional African singing & clapping]
Olowo: Every single member get paid directly from Alaffia.
So all these 4,000 people we have to manage,
and each of them have these one,
and it shows how much they got paid.
That way there's no corruption within the collectives.
Maya: Right.
Olowo: Each person gets their money.
Lots of people can say they have fair trade,
but there's no way they can be able to trace it
all the way, we can trace --
Maya: All the way back to the person.
Olowo: All the way to the village,
and we have the document to prove that
and a contract to prove that.
And typically a fair trader entity,
the U.S. is buying is somebody else
that say they're fair trade.
But with Alaffia it's all vertical.
It's an integrated system, and that's very important,
that's the only way you can truly ensure that
the very poor is receiving something,
there is no other way,
and those documents support that.
Olowo: We going to end up here.
We're going to be doing lots of work here.
Maya: This guy.
Step one, we get the nuts from the collectives.
It gets here, when it gets here we wash them.
We get cleaning them, like the ladies are doing right now.
And after it goes to drying, drying is very important.
It's to reduce the moisture content so it doesn't get moldy.
And once that's done it comes here and it gets weighted again.
So after we dry it,
you see there are multiple storage rooms,
it goes to crushing, we have to crush the nuts,
and then once we crush it, it goes to roasting.
After roasting, then it goes back to grinding
to make it into a paste.
And when we get a paste we do about 50% water,
so you whip it by hand.
And once you whip by hand, after an hour or 40 minutes
-- depending on the speed --
the fats will start separating,
and then that's when you put warm water in it,
and warm water brings all the fat to the surface,
and then we collect the fat on the surface,
put it in the heat, which turns to oil,
and then you take that oil and you stir it into it,
and then it turns to butter.
[traditional African singing & clapping]
♪ ♪
[traditional African singing & clapping]
We're very sad to be leaving right now,
but we're going to the kindergarten, though.
We're going to see a bunch of kids,
it's going to be even harder.
[laughter]
Fran: Oh gosh!
Maya: In their uniform, oh they're so cute.
[traditional drum music]
Maya: Oh, this is the school. Male: Yeah, the kindergarten,
and I'll show you the whole school.
Maya: Okay.
Male: They didn't have a kindergarten.
Maya: Oh they didn't?
Male: Only 50 of them didn't have the kindergarten.
Maya: So where were they? Just at home?
Male: They were sharing sometimes with the big boys.
Maya: Oh, okay.
Male: With the big kids.
Yeah, so we build this one for them.
Maya: Okay.
Fran: How do you feel every time you do this?
Male: I'm overwhelmed, feel like I need to do more.
And I will do more.
Maya: That's the bathroom.
They didn't have a bathroom before, so they built it.
That's Asian style squats.
Fran: Yeah.
[traditional African singing]
Maya: That face though!
[laughter]
[traditional African drum music]
Maya: Where are we going? Where to?
[traditional African drum music]
Child: Bye-bye.
[traditional African drum music]
Maya: Now how intense was that? I wasn't kidding, right?
Now you know how shea butter is made the fair trade way.
And that was not easy.
The next time you find yourself in the health food store
consider supporting Alaffia.
You're not only supporting an amazing company,
but you're supporting a community and a movement.
Comment below and let me know
what your favorite body lotion is.
For me I do love my shea butter,
and of course I'm rocking my Alaffia shea butter.
And until next time, remember to do you, boo.
Be shameless.
Maya: Not the rooster in the giant --
Fran: That was hilarious.
[chatter & laughter]
Wait, it was funny because he was like,
"They left you guys food." I'm like...