Sunday, November 1, 2009

A Day in the Life...

Early some mornings the melodious singing chant of the muezzin calling Muslims to prayer wakes me and then lulls me back to sleep.  Most mornings I get out of bed some time later than the muezzin probably would prefer, and make coffee on my single-burner kerosene stove. I take my steaming coffee, complete with powdered milk, out to the balcony to drink, and I wave at the neighbors as they go about their morning washing.

Muhammad the bodaboda driver, the son of Elias, one of the staff facilitators at Peace Kawomera, arrives and waits for me on his motorcycle in the gas station below my apartment at 9:45am.  I hop on, and we ride past the Sleeping Baby Lotion Factory, cross the center of town on Kumi Road, and continue until we turn onto the dirt road that goes towards Mount Elgon and that leads to Namanyonyi, the community where Peace Kawomera’s current office is.  We pass scores of other motorcycles, as it is the most popular form of transport both within the city and between the city and rural areas, as well as numerous people on bicycles, people traveling shorter distances on the roads on foot, and of course a few vehicles.

The landscape is a mosaic of shades of green and brown – small coffee fields spotted with shade trees, houses with their red-brown dirt patios, treeless maize or bean fields, fields of bushy, pointy-leaved cassava plants.  There are also fields with stubs of coffee plants, silent testimony to different periods when desperate farmers cut down their coffee - in the 1970s when Uganda’s economy collapsed under Amin, its coffee completely devalued simply because it could not get to market, and in the 1990s during the global coffee crisis, when prices sunk lower than production costs for most coffee farmers.  This is a landscape of smallholders living hand-to-mouth, producing what they eat on small, piecemeal plots, selling what little is left over, and growing coffee to earn a little cash.
                                                          
But there is a glimmer of hope for smallholder coffee farmers on Mount Elgon.  Peace Kawomera is organizing farmer groups with the help of a USAID grant.  So far they have organized about thirty or forty groups of twenty-five farmers each, with the help of six farmers who were hired as facilitators, or promoters.  The very act of organizing has the farmers with more hope, more motivation.  They see that the grave problems they face on a daily basis– lack of knowledge about how to fight coffee pests, how to fertilize the fields with little financial resources and no formal training on how to produce organic fertilizers from on-farm waste – are better faced together, learning from the body of knowledge that already exists amongst their neighbors, affirming their own existing skills and expertise as farmers. 

Every day I attend a meeting of a different farmer group, in a different community, and I listen to their concerns, their questions, their discussions. ask at the meetings, can you help with this? How big and how deep do I make the holes for planting seedlings? Where I am going to get seedlings?  Often, a member of the farmer group meeting will offer an answer and begin a discussion about all the possible solutions, and by the end of it, they have realized that they themselves have many of the tools and knowledge to confront the problems that made them feel helpless and dependent on donor organizations before, and At the same time, Peace Kawomera is supporting the formation of these groups to provide training to improve coffee quality, and to get better prices for their product.  But the idea is that the farmers can have the capacity to improve their own lives and demand more. With time and work, it is happening.
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At the end of the day, Muhammad arrives on his motorcycle to the community where I happen to be.  I say my goodbyes and my thank yous, and I know I will continue to work with them in the next nine months, and I hop on behind Mohammad and make the journey, often through the daily afternoon rain, back to Mbale city.  





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