WOW 2015!

Thanks for making 2014 an amazing year for Ganesh Himal Trading, the producers in Nepal and for supporting Fair Trade. We look forward to another great year together and to bringing you many new products and stories from our upcoming trip to Nepal in March!

As we continue to celebrate our 30 years of Fair Trade in Nepal we hope to bring you insight into the amazing impact that Fair Trade is making there, but as we enter into 2015 I want to focus on what is often unseen and dedicate this newsletter to our GHT staff.  These 4 amazing women, Eileen, Sarah, Austin and Michele, here in Spokane, are the core of what we do.  They talk with you on the phone, strategize on how to bring you the most pertinent information and the easiest website to navigate, handpick beautiful jewelry and knits, neatly pack your orders and dream big, not only for the producers in Nepal, but for the success of all of your businesses. Without these 4 dedicated women Ganesh Himal would not be what it is!  They are the jewels in the lotus!

At the start of each year I connect with each of these women one on one to hear their frustrations, solutions, dreams and desires. I ask each of them what nourished them in the past year working at GHT.  All of them said without hesitation, "our customers" and "the work that we do with the producers in Nepal".  They feel & understand the weave of community that we are all creating and love their work because of it. Their work is not a job, it's a lifestyle, and that is such an inspiration to me.

If you haven't had the opportunity to talk with these women, I hope you will in 2015. I encourage you to to get to know them and to thank them for their hard work and dedication to you and to Fair Trade. Each of them reflects the beauty of 1000 lights across what is sometimes a dim a dark horizon.

To highlight how grateful I am to my staff and to the producers and to you, our customers, who make it all happen, I leave you with this beautiful passage from the Rig Veda... We are each other's light. Here's to a fantastic 2015 together! Denise

There is an endless net of threads throughout the universe.

 The horizontal threads are in space. 

The vertical threads are in time. 

At every crossing of the threads, there is an individual, and every individual is a crystal bead. 

And every crystal bead reflects 

not only the light from every other crystal in the net, 

but also every other reflection throughout the entire universe.

-Rig Veda