Journey to Uganda

My stopover in the UK is quickly and enjoyably passing in a series of rainy days in Kerry's house in Kenton, sunny days eating fish and chips at the seaside of Teignmouth with Ian and his family, and lovely nights in noisy pubs with new and old friends. It has been a visit full of conversations about my life and theirs, what we have done and what we have not, what has changed, what we are thinking for the future.  These conversations have me looking forward, towards this coming Thursday when I board my final flight to Uganda, and also backwards, remembering how I got to this moment.

Many of you responded to the email announcing the launching of this blog, and I thank you for your good wishes.  One response came from Paul Katzeff of Thanksgiving Coffee Company, the company in Fort Bragg that buys the coffee produced by Mirembe Kawomera, the cooperative I will be working with in Uganda.  Paul wrote: "How interesting? You show up with Amber and Lidia a decade ago and I get you connected to Nicaragua and now you are doing your Doctorate in Uganda at another Thanksgiving Site. What was the evolution of this adventure?"

Yes, what was the evolution of this adventure?  Why Uganda?  How Uganda? So here starts the real meat of this blog...

First, let me start by saying that Paul from Thanksgiving has entered my life a few times at key points, each time inadvertently pushing me in one way or another, either to do something that might have seemed impossible to me or to think about things in new ways. In 2001, I was a junior at UCLA interested in agriculture and rural development, but having grown up in Los Angeles, I had absolutely no experience with either.  I was, however, getting politicized in what I would say was a more critical way, and involved in the student fair trade campaign at UCLA, which was exclusively focused on bringing more fair trade coffee to the UCLA cafes at that point.  I got an undergraduate research grant to investigate alternative agricultural systems in Central America, but was in a position of having no real research contacts and having to do the research in Central America by the end of the 2001-02 academic year.  That summer I had gotten an internship up in Mendocino County (Northern California) working on an organic permaculture farm, with the idea of getting at least nominal experience in agriculture before I went and studied it.  I was staying with my friend Amber and her family in Fort Bragg, and her mom suggested that Amber, I, and our friend Lida go and talk to Paul at Thanksgiving Coffee Co., because they worked with coffee cooperatives in Nicaragua and perhaps we could go and work with one of the cooperatives there.  Paul agreed to meet with us.  He sat us around a coffee cupping table and told us about Thanksgiving and its relationships with CECOCAFEN cooperative in Matagalpa, Nicaragua.  By the end of the meeting, I was afire with Paul's description of the revolutionary Nicaraguan smallholder cooperatives and all they were doing to transform their world.  Paul could not have known how things would work out almost a decade later, but his openness towards three passionate young university students at that cupping table meeting that summer in Fort Bragg was instrumental in opening up my own vision of life and what I thought was possible.

Paul got us in touch with Chris Bacon, then working on his PhD at UC Santa Cruz, whose dissertation work centered on the relationship between Fair Trade and the social and environmental development processes amongst the smallholder farmers of CECOCAFEN.  Over the fall quarter, I would drive up to Santa Cruz to meet with Chris so that we could hash out what I would be doing, and what my project would be about.  Chris remains a colleague and friend to this day, but I am confident that he was incredibly annoyed by my endless naive questioning and frequent meetings at coffee houses that took up much of his weekends that Fall. But I think he knows I am ever grateful. :)

Getting on with the story, I went in January 2002 with Amber and Lida for an initial visit of three months.  I worked on getting my Spanish up to a functional level, I lived in a base cooperative community called La Reina, where I performed interviews for my research project, and I worked with one of the agricultural technicians, Chacon, in visiting a number of rural communities and cooperatives affiliated with CECOCAFEN to evaluate their potential for a community-based coffee tourism project. At the end of the three months, I was in love - with the cooperative, the families, the vision and collective project of human development and community empowerment. So I went back to UCLA and finished my last quarter.  One week after graduating, I was on a plane back to Nicaragua.  I stayed there until February 2005, almost three years, working first on a natural medicine project with a women's group in the cooperative, then on a roasting project to get good quality coffee from the cooperative into the local Nicaraguan market.  But thanks to Pedro Haslam, then manager of CECOCAFEN, I was hired as project coordinator for the community based agroecotourism project when it was finally funded by Lutheran World Relief in 2003, and most of my time was spent coordinating trainings and infrastructure development for the project, as well as logistical planning and coordination for the various groups of tourists and solidarity organizations that visited the communities participating in the project.

I left living in Nicaragua in 2005, and started my Master's degree in Geography at the University of Kansas in August of 2005.  Over the next four years I got my MA and began my PhD, but also became involved with the local fair trade group in Lawrence and with United Students for Fair Trade.  I became very passionate about promoting closer relationships between student fair trade groups and producer organizations around the world, and my work with USFT primarily centered on furthering a vision of mutual learning and solidarity between the two constituencies of fair trade.  I got to know producers from Asia, Latin America, and Africa (including Mirembe Kawomera), hearing their stories and their concerns, all of which challenged my views on alternative trade and development and made me constantly question how we as students, activists, businesspeople and consumers approach alternative models of trade, how we listen to people speak about their needs, how we assure equal participation in the building of models to meet those needs, and how our ideologies and politics intersect with our promotion of certain models and not others.
All of these musings in the midst of activism led to my PhD dissertation project.  I am essentially interested in how different coffee cooperatives access alternative coffee markets and certifications, and the role of social relations and networks, local political economy, local environments and ideologies in inhibiting or facilitating access to these markets.  I will write in more detail about my project in another blog post, but basically it is a comparative study of three coffee cooperatives: CECOCAFEN in Matagalpa, Nicaragua; Cooxupe in Sul de Minas, Brazil, and Mirembe Kawomera in Mbale, Uganda. 

As Paul mentioned in his email to me, Mirembe Kawomera, like CECOCAFEN, sells their coffee to Thanksgiving.  The story of the cooperative is best told by the cooperative itself, and I invite you to visit its website at http://www.mirembekawomera.com/cooperative.  You will see, as Paul wrote in his email to me, that "this is all about Economic Development because of the peace that the people created for themselves first. However, it is also Peace through economic development and prosperity.That prosperity is dependent on Thanksgiving Coffees ability to sell all their coffee ."  So I also invite you to go to Thanksgiving Coffee Company's online store and purchase a bag or two of Mirembe Kawomera's coffee, so you can taste its "delicious peace" for yourself and support both peace and economic development through your purchase.  You can find the link to the online store on the sidebar of this blog, or here: http://store.thanksgivingcoffee.com/product_info?products_id=29.

That was my (life)journey to Uganda...Stay tuned for more!