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Too Good To Be True?

Too Good To Be True?

UK online retailer Good Gifts wants you to buy a Kalashnikov rifle (most likely an AK-47) -- £25. Or perhaps a rocket launcher (£55). Or a tank, for £1000. Not for your own use, mind you, but to provide the raw materials for enterprising blacksmiths and metalworkers in Sierra Leone, who turn the iron and such into "farm implements... hoes and axe heads... pickaxes, sickles and even school bells." A single tank will provide a year's work for 5 blacksmiths, they say, and convert into 3,000 items.

This sounds amazing and clever. Although the Good Gifts site provides few details about how it's accomplished (and how everyone's certain that the AK-47 goes to the blacksmith and not the local militia), the organization behind the site, the Charities Advisory Trust, is reputable, and several UK media outlets have profiled the Good Gifts program.

It's not every day we actually get to turn the modern equivalent of swords into plowshares.

(Via HippyShopper)

(Posted by Jamais Cascio in QuickChanges at 03:21 PM)

Via WorldChanging: Another World Is Here

Originally from
ReBlogged by ann p on Nov 30, 2005 at 06:09 PM Posted by ann p on Nov 30, 2005 at 06:09 PM

Comments

Posted by: plouaw okieylm at 13.08.2007 06:09 AM