Recently Joe met a young lady named Beth - and was totally bowled over by all her commitment, energy and determination.
Beth is the driving force behind the ‘Turtle Bags’ company. An organisation that passionately advocates that we stop using the world’s oceans as our biggest waste ‘disposal’ unit, choking turtles and other sea creatures now, and threatening all our futures to come. ( Check out the Marine Conservation Society, www.mcsuk.org )

Now loads of her energy is going into giving women - women who have led such horrendous lives that we really don’t even want to begin to imagine what they have gone through - a new chance.
A first chance to take over their own lives, decide their own future, and ensure their children would never go through what they had to.

Beth, and all the people she works with, are not handing out charity though.
They are giving people a chance to help themselves by working, by being productive, and earning a proper, living wage.
She told us that it’s when these ladies stop looking down, when they start looking her in the eye when they are just talking, that she feels the deepest satisfaction.
Why ?
Because, at last, they are recognising that they are equal, they are as good as anybody else in the world, and they deserve the same respect that we all take for granted.
Respect that they have never, ever, had before.

So we though perhaps we could help a little bit too - by offering some useful and, we think, lovely things made these ladies.

These Laptop Bags are made by some ladies in Dhaka, all of whom previously lived a life of enforced prostitution.

We say ladies but many had been sold – yes sold – into this life as girls,
girls as young as 5, 6 or 7.

They all have horrendous stories.
Such as popping out of their village home to buy an ice cream, being abducted, sold on 4 times by slimeballs, and ending forced to work the streets of Dhaka.

This Uplift programme is giving them back not only dignity, but a chance to shape their own futures.

A chance not one of them has ever had before.