tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-67193457685388633482024-03-13T13:55:11.013-05:00Still Wanderingsbecomings and goings of (almost) a year in UgandaHeather Putnamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16889237553116709104noreply@blogger.comBlogger25125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6719345768538863348.post-42226629901378551482010-04-18T15:25:00.001-05:002010-04-18T15:28:02.900-05:00blogging on two glasses of wine...maybe threeIt's my third day in England. The ash continues to coat the atmosphere between 3000 and 11,000 feet, although you could have fooled me, as the silicon-particle ash is invisible. My luggage is "somewhere in Terminal 5" as the friendly British Airways customer service agent informed me today when I changed my reservation today for the second time since Thursday. I'm not worried. There might be some pressing situations waiting for me on the other side of the pond, but what can I do? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Except make the best of it.<br />
So far making the best of it has been lovely. A train ride down to Eastbourne, where Felicity's parents live, but they are stuck in Spain because of volcanic ash as well, so we have the house to ourselves. A walk along the seaside promenade between Meads Village and Eastbourne to have fish and chips and some shopping (because I had no clothes), and a walk through town; a day in Brighton enjoying the beautiful sunshine along with the rest of Brighton in the Lanes and on the seaside before hitting a nice pub, falling in love with the Dark Star Espresso Stout (THE best thing ever!!!!) before they ran out, and meeting some awesome folks to hang out with the rest of the night; and a nice, brisk afternoon walk from Meads to Beachy Head to see the lighthouse today before stopping at a local pub and heading home to make a nice dinner. After a couple of glasses of wine with dinner, I thought I should update my friends and family about what I have been doing. As you have already figured out, I am managing. <br />
I have no idea when the airports will open airspace, when I will get a seat on a plane, when I will get home. But until then, here I am. Felicity is heading home to Edinburgh tomorrow. I so want to go with her, but I want to stay near the airport in case they open airspace again and I happen to be able to catch a seat on some flight to the US last minute. Alas, Edinburgh is one of the most fabulous cities I have ever visited, but this time it just isn't possible. <br />
On to my next glass of wine...what does tomorrow hold?<br />
Life is definitely all about flexibility, isn't it?Heather Putnamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16889237553116709104noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6719345768538863348.post-15808207762442889422010-04-13T05:32:00.000-05:002010-04-13T05:32:50.199-05:00My last dayMy last day in Kampala. I have been preparing to leave Uganda for weeks now, so I am not running around like crazy doing last minute errands; instead I am sitting thinking about what it means to leave.<div><br />
<div>How was Uganda? The question is inevitable when I return. Of course. And I will respond, Oh, it was great. But that response is a convenient social escape, and does not do justice to either the experience or the enormously contradictory feelings I have about the experience. In many ways, the work I came to do here in Uganda was similar to extended-period work I have done in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Brazil over the years: all of the experiences involved some kind of project work for a coffee cooperative, either paid or volunteer, and most involved research for my thesis or dissertation, All involved a process of going somewhere, learning a new culture, learning to live in that culture, and working through all of the difficulties I would have with that particular culture to achieve some kind of collaboration that everybody could be satisfied with. </div><div><br />
</div><div>Here in Uganda, the collaborations have been incredible fruitful: a proposal for a staff capacity-building project, the development of a proposal for a climate change adaptation project for farmers in the cooperative, and the completion of a diagnostic study for a possible tourism project, as well as farm surveys and interviews for my own PhD research. Working with the cooperative staff and members on this work taught me a thousand lessons in humility, in patience, in acceptance, and in the danger of judgement. But the loneliness of living in Mbale, the feeling that no matter how long I stayed, I would never fit in, never be anonymous, never stop being alien, other, was overpowering. Maybe I could have overcome it, maybe I would have grown out of it after a couple more months. But instead, I decided to leave a month early. </div><div><br />
</div><div>So Uganda has left me feeling hopeful for the future of Peace Kawomera and disappointed by some of the setbacks I witnessed, humbled by my experience and proud of my work, enthusiastic about the future and ambivalent about what I will do with what I have learned. I will miss this place, the people I worked with here, the friends that I made and hopefully will keep, the beautiful green mountains I worked in. But I am breathing a sigh of relief that I am going.</div><div><br />
</div><div><br />
</div></div>Heather Putnamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16889237553116709104noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6719345768538863348.post-32556387679353243112010-04-03T06:01:00.000-05:002010-04-03T06:01:33.249-05:00mzuuuuuunguuuuuuu......<i>Mzuuunguuuuuuuu! Mzuuuunguuuuuu! Mzuuunguuuuuu!</i><br />
<i><br />
</i><br />
The high-pitched voices rang out like church bells, sometimes near-sounding but other times far-reaching and echoing through the neighborhood all the way up to my fourth-floor veranda. <br />
<br />
<i>Mzuuunguuuuuuu! Mzuuuunguuuuuu!</i><br />
<i><br />
</i><br />
Damn, I thought, the local kids are doing it again, calling incessantly every time they see a <i>mzungu</i> (white person) leave their apartment and descend the outside stairs facing their houses on their way out to do whatever it is us <i>mzungus</i> do. We always wave, but they keep calling, wanting some other response. Maybe they want us to dance or something. <br />
<br />
But it kept going. The voices kept ringing...calling...<br />
<br />
So I went out onto the veranda to see what was going on. Below, two houses away down the narrow dirt road stretching into the neighborhood, a group of two or three kids were kneeling together in a circle on the edge of the road, heads lowered and hands cupped around their mouths as they called, <i>mzuuuuuunguuuuuuu! mzuuuuuuunguuuuuuuuu!</i> Once in a while they would life their heads and I could see that they had been kneeling over a small sheet of plastic placed over a hole in the ground. They would fiddle with the plastic, pick something up, occasionally chase something around on the ground. The voices echoed from farther away - looking past the first group of children kneeling on the road, I saw various groups kneeling in dirt yards, on the sides of paths, on the road...all kneeling and calling...<br />
<br />
What on earth? What are they doing? Is it some kind of ritual the kids were play-acting? I remember I did that with my friends when I was a little girl - we would perform mock sacrifices with grasshoppers, experimenting with "magic" and generally doing the silly things that children do to explore the supernatural and natural order of things.<br />
<br />
My neighbor Leanne came up to the fourth floor to check on her laundry which was hanging to dry at the end of the veranda. I asked her if she knew what they were doing. Trapping white ants, she told me. Trapping white ants. Nothing supernatural. Apparently, the high-pitched calls "disturbed" the ants and made them come up out of their holes, these big white ants, a delicacy in these parts. I haven't tried them myself, but supposedly they are scrumptious. Kind of like the fried or dried grasshoppers with chili and lime that you get in Mexico. Yum. Ugandans also eat grasshoppers as a delicacy, but it isn't the season right now. But last December, when they were in season, all the kids were running around our building catching them to bring back for their families to enjoy.<br />
<br />
I burst out laughing after Leanne revealed the mystery of the kneeling, shouting children. Of course! They are calling "muzunuuuuguuuuuu" because the ants are white! They are calling "whiiitteeeeyyy! whiiitteeeyyyy!" in the local language. I explained my revelation to Leanne and we both got a good laugh out of it. It's not just us! We aren't the only <i>mzungus</i>! The ants get labelled too! Funny enough, I think we both felt a kind of relief when we realized this.Heather Putnamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16889237553116709104noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6719345768538863348.post-51754694759280644672010-03-30T04:42:00.002-05:002010-03-30T04:44:54.085-05:00Updates and ambiguity: Bududa landslide disaster continues Disasters come in and out of the news as fast as celebrity love affairs, it seems. Have you seen or heard anything in the last week or so on the news on the Bududa landslide disaster? Well, the disaster continues. I personally have not visited the villages that were so devastated by the torrential rains that hit in early March and the resulting landslides, and I don't plan to, with only two weeks left here in Uganda; anyway, what good could I do just standing there with my mouth agape staring at other people's misfortune? Not much, besides write about it on this blog. But I want to avoid that kind of voyeurism, so instead I am sharing with you a <a href="http://www.walesforafrica.org/blog/2010/03/aftermaths/">blog post</a> written by a friend of mine, John Harrington, for the website and organization Wales for Africa, a Welsh aid organization. You will read that of the 300 people missing, only a fraction of that number of bodies has been found. And the ambiguity in how emergency aid is being administered is disheartening. I encourage you to keep up with the blog as new updates come in from firsthand visits to Bududa.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.walesforafrica.org/blog/2010/03/aftermaths/">http://www.walesforafrica.org/blog/2010/03/aftermaths/</a>Heather Putnamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16889237553116709104noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6719345768538863348.post-26434209711487689302010-03-25T14:07:00.002-05:002010-03-25T14:11:14.078-05:00Some photos from last month's trip to Zanzibar<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTIrcU7bnZ0NNFXPGqhfk7A-zVeFWTZt4g909PvZ8ajF-MZ_Oo6cWhFWi8ZUR1VYDa_MNvfQ5M-hKsUU7ft4hMde5hUAi_PTloNy0bD-8pUdsdSiLoyZIGO-Q0YIMVQ3vso-HM7RrWWsY/s1600/DSC01097.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTIrcU7bnZ0NNFXPGqhfk7A-zVeFWTZt4g909PvZ8ajF-MZ_Oo6cWhFWi8ZUR1VYDa_MNvfQ5M-hKsUU7ft4hMde5hUAi_PTloNy0bD-8pUdsdSiLoyZIGO-Q0YIMVQ3vso-HM7RrWWsY/s320/DSC01097.JPG" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVCo5cUN280JsGZpG9fU7Ygt2twrMOZIQxi8-WvIGXyn3rag3MEpnursIms9uMYh0-XPM2BREFd6Moz3ec6r0fZEsPPWvo89iZU7QEyusRamuq1aPidETk3WhVYSjl27zovVpoA-sZ6_I/s1600/DSC01099.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVCo5cUN280JsGZpG9fU7Ygt2twrMOZIQxi8-WvIGXyn3rag3MEpnursIms9uMYh0-XPM2BREFd6Moz3ec6r0fZEsPPWvo89iZU7QEyusRamuq1aPidETk3WhVYSjl27zovVpoA-sZ6_I/s320/DSC01099.jpg" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTAzLxcCXMF9Q_Tg62bSDBm2sae3L4hgR3cqqDCfPq0WqswLdlABZoJhFqm-FlweHCq83PppZXAubFM4m-yOqxnJ9aZ_gNgeOpBscOn_5WPURbkA7DCGeu-8J2wtxOK1VRSZw8uwaiaPA/s1600/DSC01110.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTAzLxcCXMF9Q_Tg62bSDBm2sae3L4hgR3cqqDCfPq0WqswLdlABZoJhFqm-FlweHCq83PppZXAubFM4m-yOqxnJ9aZ_gNgeOpBscOn_5WPURbkA7DCGeu-8J2wtxOK1VRSZw8uwaiaPA/s320/DSC01110.JPG" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYrPjU1oNOpOW_JlJUPq48rvj-Wp6NRb9WBC7Z9-gbIJE6I7ut75E-K7ZK3W4y-ZOzWRS0agLXtCRV5saacjtR0FFqiSIK34eZodryIO7z07-s-WBEuHjqGsHXBommV5oHFXsr6IwotuY/s1600/IMG00126-20100211-1846.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; 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float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7ET2PwZW4tz99N4iQglF10zCtfK856l1cjyD10BqK6EIIlVUYjkfxqyr1cMBCPU374gF03joNa_QrcQZF5XuWaUcFYxg8hBBdSx0YNoK1aApwhq3-pjuiiD3xC2Cp6hJ34je13-Dc_0Y/s320/DSC01081.jpg" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWEeDyHOYiZX1jz6n069jA5DvCdKNAa7rjAJn0pahV6Jn9WWX9RprSMPFtYFNZzJxKYX-RqigO70Wbzol1x6VX19Cm9LNtNhglV9ZDFyGnM3mBjjkAO8fJ0wcl_qTPd2qu8USoaZrEwEc/s1600/DSC01104.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWEeDyHOYiZX1jz6n069jA5DvCdKNAa7rjAJn0pahV6Jn9WWX9RprSMPFtYFNZzJxKYX-RqigO70Wbzol1x6VX19Cm9LNtNhglV9ZDFyGnM3mBjjkAO8fJ0wcl_qTPd2qu8USoaZrEwEc/s320/DSC01104.JPG" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg84GY9uu4NNVMfvaLoelnQnZp4anJ9RMTEw9FNouOG141nzii6PxN8sUHvdjU8IllkpTDr58-N8po6cT-wUOzFx8UUaigSP7x3dwXD1vjZmpIojqwR3tRt15b5S0NJgaiGbnazToNNw1M/s1600/DSC01068.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg84GY9uu4NNVMfvaLoelnQnZp4anJ9RMTEw9FNouOG141nzii6PxN8sUHvdjU8IllkpTDr58-N8po6cT-wUOzFx8UUaigSP7x3dwXD1vjZmpIojqwR3tRt15b5S0NJgaiGbnazToNNw1M/s320/DSC01068.jpg" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNEaIBN_ckoJf688HYt69TgpqtT1_hgOoT64da6Ntn7f7zJenbwTAzv5Argq2IuxfAA_IwE1IsrL9bPfcTrlKqrL9PrYnm9puNJeKJK2RVUU5XzJv5ZepTY5__GswHu-Yoq6l23-BhsJc/s1600/DSC01101.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNEaIBN_ckoJf688HYt69TgpqtT1_hgOoT64da6Ntn7f7zJenbwTAzv5Argq2IuxfAA_IwE1IsrL9bPfcTrlKqrL9PrYnm9puNJeKJK2RVUU5XzJv5ZepTY5__GswHu-Yoq6l23-BhsJc/s320/DSC01101.JPG" /></a></div>Heather Putnamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16889237553116709104noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6719345768538863348.post-23075277423054282502010-03-15T10:20:00.001-05:002010-03-15T10:22:25.005-05:00Roadtrip to Gulu!Last week I needed some girl time as well as a distraction - Tom had left for the US on Sunday and I was faced with an empty apartment just at a time when I didn't feel like being alone. Just in time, my friend Kate from Lawrence, who has lived in Kampala for the last three years, invited me to accompany her on a trip up to Gulu, in Northern Uganda. Gulu District shares a border with Sudan, and is most well known for the insurgent fighting by the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), which caused over 90% of the population to be displaced, leading to the establishment of scores of IDP camps where rural peoples, sometimes entire communities, have taken refuge and attempted to carry on with life. In the last couple of years the violence has lessened, and families are beginning to leave the IDP camps to return to their villages in rural areas. At the same time, the town of Gulu is awash in development and aid organizations that have moved in as the violence has reduced - I was a little weirded out by the quantity of white development professionals I would see just walking down the street! You have to understand, there are very few white people in Mbale, so when I see one here in Mbale I generally find myself staring at him or her as if they were an alien (and this is when I myself complain incessantly about feeling like an alien living here :) ).<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZQPaw22FzxdzvMaEEMCjfE2rP4T_EN5paiSXIrZKpqrz1h7i7AUrGO30y0wiGYTvDVnRxoKqiX4BvS4Cn6vc7nIheSAtR0JqeA7GQszUM1O9xFRnhQmOFYe2lYtHf0JAhZq9PwX26D98/s1600-h/DSC03608.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZQPaw22FzxdzvMaEEMCjfE2rP4T_EN5paiSXIrZKpqrz1h7i7AUrGO30y0wiGYTvDVnRxoKqiX4BvS4Cn6vc7nIheSAtR0JqeA7GQszUM1O9xFRnhQmOFYe2lYtHf0JAhZq9PwX26D98/s320/DSC03608.JPG" /></a><br />
Anyway...<br />
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Besides wanting to get out of town, see Gulu (now that it is safe to travel there), and spend some time with Kate, I was really excited to see the women tailor group that Kate works with through her business Awava. Kate has been working with a group of women tailors, some of them from the IDP camps, for a couple of years now to develop and produce beautiful bags and accessories (even men's ties!) made out of African wax-print cloth. <br />
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Can you say <span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: red;">Amazing Women</span>! I accompanied Kate on her visits to the tailors in the market stall where they work and also sell products and cloth. It was truly impressive to hear Lucy, the head tailor, talk about everything she has learned in the last couple of years, all of the skills she has developed in training other women how to sew, how she is able to pay school fees; things are still hard, she and everyone else are still struggling to survive, but the work she does for Awava, and the other opportunities that have come out of that work, are helping little by little. <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMWzmGODglUySX7gH_NzA81AlV4KhP3H-9lLbfd5eXbMsx9oJdjX8zZ0BIS0eHW46KAQCkMN0qEmTJ3n_ms0MG0XZkeCNmmRDCirSFb3aDqhEjDTJh0EHAN5OrckTuOTPGRz0p85Ci7GQ/s1600-h/DSC03603.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMWzmGODglUySX7gH_NzA81AlV4KhP3H-9lLbfd5eXbMsx9oJdjX8zZ0BIS0eHW46KAQCkMN0qEmTJ3n_ms0MG0XZkeCNmmRDCirSFb3aDqhEjDTJh0EHAN5OrckTuOTPGRz0p85Ci7GQ/s320/DSC03603.JPG" /></a><br />
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Check out Awava's website and see the cool work that the seamstresses in Gulu are doing, as well as the cool ways that Awava is supporting their livelihoods and improving working conditions. Help support these amazing women - the products are awesome, so go ahead and order some! <a href="http://www.awavamarket.com/">(Order Awava Products!)</a><br />
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I actually didn't take many photos of Gulu itself, but I did take some on the drives there and back from Kampala, because really, who can resist baboons on the side of the road?Heather Putnamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16889237553116709104noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6719345768538863348.post-8616273879936048722010-03-12T07:05:00.002-06:002010-03-14T03:15:51.392-05:00It's been a long time coming...Yes, I am still alive. I got a message from a friend a few days ago asking me how I was, since they had not looked at my blog since I have been here in Uganda. I realized that I myself hadn't looked at my blog in, oh, say, maybe five or six weeks. That's just plain sad. So what's been going on? Why have I not written?<br />
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<div>A lot has been going on.<br />
<br />
</div><div>Any of you who have lived in another country, especially one with a very different culture, know that there is a kind of cycle to living in places like this as a foreigner. You arrive, find a place to live, and immediately set out getting to know the people, the land, the culture, the language. Along the way, you identify your favorite places to eat, the best places to find the foods you like, the most friendly bar with the coldest beer, and all the other things you need to feel at home during the hours when you are not at work. This work of settling in is fascinating, pleasurable, and relatively easy, and it lasts about a month or two. At about that point, find yourself settling into a kind of routine where you recognize the people on the street on your way home, and you know the guys staffing the supermarket counter by name. You congratulate yourself silently for having made yourself so at home and for having been so adaptable to such different cultural norms and customs.<br />
<br />
</div><div>Then something strange happens. First you start to get annoyed at the children and men shouting "mzungu" (whitey) at you every five feet as you walk to the market to buy vegetables. Then you start snapping at the people who laugh at you and exclaim "mzungus don't cook!" after you tell them that you have a stove and, yes, you cook food for yourself. Finally you get to the point of wishing you were invisible when you leave your apartment and every kid in the neighborhood follows you as you walk down the street. You find yourself being perpetually angry and frustrated. The only thing you want, the only thing you desire, is some anonymity. Just to be able to walk around the city and blend in. It gets to the point where you start avoiding going outside except to work, but even at work you find yourself silently judging everyone. It basically deteriorates into a kind of break-down, where the slightest thing annoys you, and everything about the place you are in is wrong. Even as you are aware of how ridiculous this is, and how ridiculous you are being, you cannot stop it. You just can't stop feeling like an alien from another planet. You start to suspect that being Black, Asian, Latino, or anyone not white in many places in the US, feels just like this - white people stare at you, trying to hide it or not, and in conversations maybe they say things to you like "you people...", putting you in a box without asking you even one question. You start to feel like some identity has been imposed on you and you must fight to impose your own, if you care about it. But this gets exhausting. Of course, I am white, but in both cases, mine as a white person and all people in the US, we've got the weight of history on our backs making us born with complicity, and then we learn fear as we live, and this is the hardest thing to change. This has been my realization.<br />
<br />
And then it just fades away (except for the realizations you have had, which stay), and everything is okay again. Life is good, you enjoy the place you are in, and you laugh at the little cultural idiosyncrasies that even a few days before had you almost in tears.<br />
<br />
</div><div>For me, this lasted about a month. I call it Delayed Culture Shock, because it does not hit immediately. I know from when I lived in Nicaragua that it returns cyclically, at least for me. Hopefully I don't get it again while I am here in Uganda... So this is the first reason I did not write in this blog for some time; I was essentially unable to communicate anything about Uganda with any fairness for some time.</div><div>After that, Tom and I took a break from Mbale and went to Zanzibar with our friend Megan (who lives in Dar) for the Sauti za Busara (Busara Music Festival), a festival of largely Swahili music, although there were also artists from other parts of Africa, and even some from Japan and a Sami artist from Norway. Our trip to Zanzibar was absolutely awesome, and the festival was fabulous. I have been back in Uganda for a couple of weeks now, and there is much to tell in terms of work. But I will leave you with this post for now, and will recount stories of Zanzibar and Mbale soon with some photos!... I promise it won't be two more months.</div><div><br />
</div>Heather Putnamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16889237553116709104noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6719345768538863348.post-25671304704049000302010-01-10T05:00:00.001-06:002010-01-10T05:04:52.966-06:00Vanilla beans and coffee flowersIt's the end of the rainy season here, and the beginning of the hot, dry season. At least, it is supposed to be. All of the farmers I work with are a little worried about the local climate, as droughts have been abnormally strong in the last couple of years, and the current rain didn't end as it was supposed to in December. Right now it is hot with the occasional rainstorm making it over the heights of Mount Elgon - Mbale is in a sort of rain shadow in respect to the storm systems that come from that direction, but it also gets rain that sneaks around the mountain and comes from the north. The point is that it should be hot and dry here, it seems that the weather is in limbo, and everyone who depends on agriculture is feeling a bit uncertain.<br />
The good thing is that the coffee is flowering wonderfully, as it should this time of year. East African coffee is unique in that it actually flowers, and thus harvests, twice per year due to the region's bimodal rainy season; Latin American coffee, by contrast, only has one flowering season, and thus harvests once per year. Driving down the road through Namanyonyi Subcounty where I work, the air is filled with the scent of the coffee flowers, which closely resembles the perfume of honeysuckle, and the coffee trees are blushing white, full of blossoms. It is beautiful, and should result in a great "fly" harvest, which is what the smaller second harvest in March-April is called.<br />
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</div>At the same time, Peace Kawomera Cooperative has been collecting vanilla beans from its members for the last three weeks, and processing is in full progress. Vanilla is an incredibly delicate and complex crop to process. The fresh green beans must be boiled, and then put through a drying process that involves the beans laying in the sun every day and then resting folded up in wool blankets every afternoon and night, for as many days as it takes for the the beans reach the proper stage of dryness for export.<br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijWzjIp0lmb4ESZWGq6t84PGUC-B77FYrpekOSzV7NsgTmlndD-U7aHESNR_uvmMYskmhkc-WIi_ZL-aND9vR2aAhPQR-sN4U750eHJKu-ykan4TcsfN68WozLg9ghRDma2kdVo_Hn3EI/s1600-h/DSC03437.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYCltnRxm-M01D6JBWycjNEU-DMfAaN0HOFgW62ZuaSd8nT301sVw0Hiatx1CqQd2A1mGPXeSxnC9K9-IeBIZz_E_F5V9njMa5do-Q_oO7kc0cvPGMx3WHeTa9eG3RxaH8MjJUhuXY1Hk/s1600-h/DSC03399.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYCltnRxm-M01D6JBWycjNEU-DMfAaN0HOFgW62ZuaSd8nT301sVw0Hiatx1CqQd2A1mGPXeSxnC9K9-IeBIZz_E_F5V9njMa5do-Q_oO7kc0cvPGMx3WHeTa9eG3RxaH8MjJUhuXY1Hk/s320/DSC03399.JPG" /></a><br />
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</div>Heather Putnamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16889237553116709104noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6719345768538863348.post-33866586690542329142010-01-04T07:41:00.002-06:002010-01-04T11:16:29.097-06:00A true retreat<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Tom and I had planned our three-night trip to Hairy Lemon Island, on the Nile River about an hour and a half from Jinja (or about three and a half hours from Mbale) with the idea that we needed to get away from work, and from the madness that Mbale was during Christmas. We wanted to truly get away from everything, but we packed our laptops so that we could catch up on our own little projects.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">After arriving to the bank of the river in a taxi, we banged on the old tire rim hanging from a tree to summon the boat to bring us across to the island. Stepping out of the long wooden canoe onto the island, we saw a small island complete with an outdoor shaded common area, and a few small bandas, or cabins, set around a grassy hill in the middle of the island, dotted with tents and a small veranda where campers could hang out. We settled into our banda and were quite pleased with the prospect of the next few days. Our banda was set on the far edge of the island, off the path, and facing the water. A large veranda with two wicker chairs held the promise of mornings spent reading in the shade, observing the large prehistoric-looking birds, the lizards, and the three-foot monitor lizards that would occasionally stop to feast or rest in the trees or the river's edge three feet from our veranda. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">That first afternoon we discovered that neither our phones nor our modems got service on the island. So we put them all away, and did not pull the them out again until we left. I realized two days into our stay at Hairy Lemon that I had not gone more than half a day without checking my email or Facebook for a very long time. I reflected on my usual habits and realized that the first thing I do every morning - before even making coffee - is open my laptop and open my email accounts. I remembered, vaguely, a time when I didn't do that. I think it must have been a year or two ago when I began opening my laptop with the same regularity as visiting the toilet in the morning. I remembered even when I wouldn't check my email for days on end, when I didn't depend on email, chat, or social networking sites to keep up on every detail of everything going on. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">So Tom and I embraced the absence of those tools wholeheartedly. We spent the entire three days pretty much doing nothing. We walked around the island, watched the myriad varieties of birds that were constantly on the water and in the trees, hunted for more monitor lizards, moved the extra cot outside to the veranda and slept or read the day away. While using the outdoor shower on our last afternoon there, we heard rustling above us and looked up in the trees, only to see half a dozen red-tailed lemurs jumping from branch to branch, munching on leaves, and carousing in general. We stood there for a good fifteen minutes with our heads tilted up watching, laughing, and snapping photos, until we realized that we were both naked and should probably shower and get out before someone else walked in looking to bathe. The beauty of the place is not only in its natural spaces, but also in the level of privacy - the staff do not visit your banda or do anything to interact with you besides serve you meals at the standard group mealtimes. Since we were pretty much the only non-kayakers on the entire island, out of around fifteen people who were staying there, we were the outsiders of the group since we couldn't participate in the kayaking conversations. So besides not having communication tools, we were also physically isolated for the most part from the other humans on the island, resulting in a true retreat. Neither of us felt to any serious extent the absence or lack of any of that; instead we felt profoundly the need, or necessity, to be without those things periodically, and to focus on ourselves and what is physically in front of and around us, real, not virtual. I can't wait to do it again.</span></span><br />
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</span></span>Heather Putnamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16889237553116709104noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6719345768538863348.post-74785458243187378032009-12-15T12:14:00.000-06:002009-12-15T12:14:17.829-06:00Time to reflect<!--StartFragment--> <br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; tab-stops: 3.75in; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Grande";">It’s been exactly two months since I boarded a plane in London for Entebbe, a good moment to reflect on how I am spending my time here, and how the experience is taking shape so far.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have transitioned from the phase of getting to know the people and organization I am working with, and the place in general, to living, functioning with some modicum of familiarity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I feel less like an alien being constantly staring with mouth open at the strangeness - and strange sameness - around me, and more like a participant, albeit a temporary one.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It definitely helps that Tom has come to stay with me until I leave; he has brought a kind of comfortable domesticity that is a kind of relief, a kind of retreat at the end of each day when I return home from work and meetings out at the cooperative.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Grande";">My work in the cooperative has come out of the needs that have arisen since I have been here.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One characteristic of Peace Kawomera, at least right now as the coffee harvest ends and the vanilla-buying season begins, is that the staff and Board are all overwhelmed, and putting effort into long-term planning and projects is difficult.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is not helped by the fact that the cooperative as an organization is very young, and its management and staff are gaining experience running an organization that has a different vision than other cooperative organizations in the area, one that requires more resources.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Promoting interfaith relations, peace, and rural development requires much more than just commercializing coffee; and even the task of producing and delivering quality coffee requires a set of very developed skills.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Peace Kawomera is a learning organization in both these respects.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Grande";">I have come here to investigate the role of institutional and local culture, social and political networks, and the environment in cooperatives’ access to coffee certifications, governance of certifications, and in the impacts that certifications have on those they are meant to benefit – in this case, smallholder coffee farmers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Peace Kawomera is my third case study, after CECOCAFEN/UCA San Ramón in Nicaragua, and Cooxup</span><span lang="ES-TRAD" style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: ES-TRAD; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Grande";">é in Brazil.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Grande";">My approach to my relationships with all of the cooperatives I work with is to make sure that the work I do benefits the cooperative and its members, as well as my own research.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In this way, I essentially came here available to work with PK on projects that they needed assistance on, because I have the time to do so, because they don’t have the time to do so, because I can actually improve my own skills in project development and writing, and because doing so also inserts me into the structure of the cooperative itself, allowing me to know it infinitely better than if I had simply arrived and performed thirty farm surveys and a set of staff interviews over a packed six-week period.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Grande";">I had met and conversed with JJ Keki, PK’s Director a few years ago at the USFT Convergence in Boston, and was impressed by the story and vision of the cooperative.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I knew it would make an interesting and unique case study in my research.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After conversations last year with Ben at Thanksgiving Coffee, and some email exchanges with JJ, it seemed that my experience managing a community agroecotourism project in Nicaragua could be useful to PK.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The initial idea is that I would work with PK to do a diagnostic study on the development of such a project with their members, as well as do farm surveys and interviews for my dissertation research.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Neither has actually been started yet in any real material fashion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They have not been forgotten, simply put on a more realistic timeline, making room for my participation in other projects.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Grande";">My time currently is split between various projects.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>First, I am working with Johnbosco, the PK Agronomist, Ben from Thanksgiving, Ben from TransfairUSA, and others to write a proposal for a small grant from the ILO for training and capacity-building.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We have succeeded in narrowing down the focus of the grant from every problem PK has, to strengthening management and administration systems and strengthening farmer groups, member participation and extension services. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am currently spending my mornings revising the second version of this grant, and we hope to submit it to the ILO early next year.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the afternoons, I have been working with the six PK Field Facilitators (themselves farmers who are hired and trained essentially to be extension agents using the Farmer Field School method) to do research on what kinds of trees farmers prefer in their coffee gardens and on other parts of their farms, and why.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We essentially are having focus groups with about twelve of the forty farmer groups, which each contain 25 farmers, and discussing that question.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The result is that I am developing a spreadsheet of trees with names in Luganda, Lugisu, Lugwele, and some English, and all of their advantages as cited by the farmers in the focus groups.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When we are done with this stage, we will hopefully apply all of this knowledge to the development of a project that will include the establishment of tree nurseries in each of the farmer groups, to facilitate increased tree planting and reforestation on their farms.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The idea here is to mitigate the long-term impacts of climate change, which here include increased drought as well as irregular and more forceful rains, through reforestation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Trees are what will protect the coffee, and protect the farmers’ livelihoods.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Grande";">I am spending my spare time mostly on working with all of the staff and Board members to compile information and text for the future Peace Kawomera website.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We have gotten as far as designing the structure of it, and now are working on information.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is moving along, but I think it will be an ongoing project for the next few months.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A bigger priority that I am not yet working on, but suspect that I soon will be, is the development of an Internal Control System for PK.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This </span><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">would involve some fieldwork to do risk assessments (probably by farmer group, but possibly by parish), outlining the roles of staff in certification systems and methods of working, and all policies and protocol for production, monitoring and documentation of practices at farm and cooperative levels, and evaluations protocols, and then a lot of office work to write it up into a sort of guidebook for the cooperative’s coffee chain.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Given how fast time is passing, I am planning to perform the tourism diagnostic with the PK staff next month, so that I can actually do my own farm surveys and interviews in February and March.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am really looking forward to working on the tourism diagnostic, as it will allow me to really get into analyzing different villages’ infrastructure, cultural activities, and accessibility, as well as potential markets, marketing plans, etc., the kind of work I really enjoy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The challenge I am having so far in getting this process started is simply getting a conversation started within the cooperative about which parishes, which villages, should benefit from tourism – where should visitors go?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am starting to get my own ideas as to this question based on my visits to the different farm groups, but I feel it is super important that we actually systematically address this question, so that we can have answers that are fair and logical.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is already a bit of tension within the cooperative as to who benefits from tourism visits, because generally speaking the Jewish members benefit more than the Christian or Muslim members from the tourists and delegations that do already come.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So I am trying to get that conversation started about which villages will actually receive visitors, and how the entire cooperative and community will benefit materially from those visits.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I will let you know how that goes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Grande"; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px;">Until then, Happy Holidays!</span></span><br />
</div><!--EndFragment-->Heather Putnamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16889237553116709104noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6719345768538863348.post-11496962928113917912009-11-30T08:07:00.000-06:002009-11-30T08:07:48.433-06:00For those who aren't on Facebook...some Thanksgiving fotos<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWUj4PDzApNP-cRsIJUES2dF9zBe0CcmI5C3wtkzs062zTtM6QHInektqwZu35qzqm1HjzZmMDv_N2QD935HXudp3zEtLZoCfEamIh6zf5TCbjaxjtg3q27-f4iqkCOonCkmvjeo1wjYU/s1600/IMG00007-20091126-2056.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWUj4PDzApNP-cRsIJUES2dF9zBe0CcmI5C3wtkzs062zTtM6QHInektqwZu35qzqm1HjzZmMDv_N2QD935HXudp3zEtLZoCfEamIh6zf5TCbjaxjtg3q27-f4iqkCOonCkmvjeo1wjYU/s320/IMG00007-20091126-2056.jpg" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghCW0z_z4SkohHSyboPCZgNfmH_W_4p03Sv_SIllV2BRQFoUB4904Ind_v7-n1jZPBHG8CnG0wS7sBkvB9kSRh9yYgHeMOzGxmA928CUUqcQQuKRNOGljqbeiNwE7c4tQUAtctxsg258M/s1600/IMG00012-20091126-2058.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghCW0z_z4SkohHSyboPCZgNfmH_W_4p03Sv_SIllV2BRQFoUB4904Ind_v7-n1jZPBHG8CnG0wS7sBkvB9kSRh9yYgHeMOzGxmA928CUUqcQQuKRNOGljqbeiNwE7c4tQUAtctxsg258M/s320/IMG00012-20091126-2058.jpg" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWvQSqnOOSsopZ1eO-iYnfCnzTdSYt8zOVnlA0Z4019nWNJPs3B24uKHI7ws91WL69wjYIj-PxQK6_BDP7hXAx0PdHGaVBH_xRlrRB4rzlLcNKEesT5I1eX7_S7DJky_TbhNcdiVdJBcI/s1600/IMG00006-20091126-1958.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWvQSqnOOSsopZ1eO-iYnfCnzTdSYt8zOVnlA0Z4019nWNJPs3B24uKHI7ws91WL69wjYIj-PxQK6_BDP7hXAx0PdHGaVBH_xRlrRB4rzlLcNKEesT5I1eX7_S7DJky_TbhNcdiVdJBcI/s320/IMG00006-20091126-1958.jpg" /></a><br />
</div>Heather Putnamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16889237553116709104noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6719345768538863348.post-33895311982115488962009-11-28T07:31:00.000-06:002009-11-28T07:31:08.203-06:00Just some random photos...<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPyZGPhxdg1t8RLvZk7_5iDG47rCp_7fAXXwr-MIqEnpgKruDcL6E3pNLRnBUjKIAZTZruf8a-mcCZe9U8PH6b4rNTA143dk5CtCWDM9Sd76btrkeFHLSHrd13Mu1Mev0ri1TzbojncW4/s1600/DSC03197.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPyZGPhxdg1t8RLvZk7_5iDG47rCp_7fAXXwr-MIqEnpgKruDcL6E3pNLRnBUjKIAZTZruf8a-mcCZe9U8PH6b4rNTA143dk5CtCWDM9Sd76btrkeFHLSHrd13Mu1Mev0ri1TzbojncW4/s320/DSC03197.JPG" width="320" /></a>Enjoying sugar cane...<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTGwzfu6fEC2fWjlt40-puqnE8C1SvUcEVsYGA-ZT1cK81rdUy5_9qa9XD2q-DDwjsiMGOJpZBZ7oSc5Hagyq0y1L6qaOaF6BxbRsrnvraWsOkZuJ3wwq4A7gwh3SLswfYmvaimtBZER4/s1600/DSC03231.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTGwzfu6fEC2fWjlt40-puqnE8C1SvUcEVsYGA-ZT1cK81rdUy5_9qa9XD2q-DDwjsiMGOJpZBZ7oSc5Hagyq0y1L6qaOaF6BxbRsrnvraWsOkZuJ3wwq4A7gwh3SLswfYmvaimtBZER4/s320/DSC03231.JPG" /></a>Johnbosco, the cooperative's agronomist, speaking to farmers at a meeting.<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFNNq_6_X3wB_ughvB2t1WDbG9Oy4dwra6lAjdk6zUGQxZaynp5PQJqE5WnnZiUdIRD0EiIZe-ygl7GlcNcfJxE5LdE8oX77xNn5xQ9qDCXkBEIpC96dN2PBpjdLjZCIcSAgJgW202baU/s1600/DSC03292.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFNNq_6_X3wB_ughvB2t1WDbG9Oy4dwra6lAjdk6zUGQxZaynp5PQJqE5WnnZiUdIRD0EiIZe-ygl7GlcNcfJxE5LdE8oX77xNn5xQ9qDCXkBEIpC96dN2PBpjdLjZCIcSAgJgW202baU/s320/DSC03292.JPG" /></a>Me and a farmer group after a meeting.<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7abynOvJIYLLGneoQwTeZoix6xDx6qoTVlP0OxkwUYLCAQwVVXPBHl2N7kc4QqGONjkOpQ7TbrwsbUgJOpdDucm60ufDqxD0tO3f6fMHxEcz3RXkvE2t2GdJtxPYuzctIAECdRWCLCKk/s1600/DSC03322.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7abynOvJIYLLGneoQwTeZoix6xDx6qoTVlP0OxkwUYLCAQwVVXPBHl2N7kc4QqGONjkOpQ7TbrwsbUgJOpdDucm60ufDqxD0tO3f6fMHxEcz3RXkvE2t2GdJtxPYuzctIAECdRWCLCKk/s320/DSC03322.JPG" /></a>The view of Mount Elgon from my balcony.<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhP1HNM_w0GjQ9EaCYYwOYh3zncyn9PO13yMGJ8vhhuzy1uWitJjCXjPvFjiQU1CBDPcYGSUxosu67PvV7GxpkLUtl1XpJzKH_-ULq3Jk50_KBAaoyncLnDHN5J1PIwPg2SIhoc9uwT34Y/s1600/DSC03316.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhP1HNM_w0GjQ9EaCYYwOYh3zncyn9PO13yMGJ8vhhuzy1uWitJjCXjPvFjiQU1CBDPcYGSUxosu67PvV7GxpkLUtl1XpJzKH_-ULq3Jk50_KBAaoyncLnDHN5J1PIwPg2SIhoc9uwT34Y/s320/DSC03316.JPG" /></a>Farmers practicing coffee pruning techniques as part of the Farmer Field School.<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizrt_WV4BrrHxBgUi0G0V4FU7wN4QHkhMuAUjmI7kYvNZAfmyeMH2tJ0CC2CXof75jPOlbJDYMOGMx_o2Me6vz2XV1yRVfOdvqbKMou6EF3N2b3olEfe7xkx0BddkKTfu3Tl1UUyoy46A/s1600/DSC03319.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizrt_WV4BrrHxBgUi0G0V4FU7wN4QHkhMuAUjmI7kYvNZAfmyeMH2tJ0CC2CXof75jPOlbJDYMOGMx_o2Me6vz2XV1yRVfOdvqbKMou6EF3N2b3olEfe7xkx0BddkKTfu3Tl1UUyoy46A/s320/DSC03319.JPG" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgU1WC8SvGKcmIBI6r79dIV125E3XJfsFu1nK36g1lUEhtpKN355SkFqtQySbPDXz4xotIK9ob7sVtnQ562-x-Py-7VhBAjGw_VnSnyDe2uqs1npUoM2KGktXLi2PaeacRNmwiyTO1I7dY/s1600/DSC03296.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgU1WC8SvGKcmIBI6r79dIV125E3XJfsFu1nK36g1lUEhtpKN355SkFqtQySbPDXz4xotIK9ob7sVtnQ562-x-Py-7VhBAjGw_VnSnyDe2uqs1npUoM2KGktXLi2PaeacRNmwiyTO1I7dY/s320/DSC03296.JPG" /></a>Me doing a workshop on website content development for PK's staff and Board.<br />
</div>Heather Putnamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16889237553116709104noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6719345768538863348.post-74325639684610210562009-11-25T08:21:00.000-06:002009-11-25T08:21:08.400-06:00Working momentsWe arrived to what I had come to realize is the normal setting for meetings of these newly-forming farmer groups - the women in myriad-colored print wraps and headscarves sitting on papyrus mats spread out under the shade of a mango tree, and the men arrayed on rough wooden benches laid out in a curve under the shade not already claimed by the women. Chairs, empty were placed facing the mats and benches, closing the circle of the meeting. We were welcomed and ushered to the chairs. A murmur of voices softly chatting or giggling at the visitors mixed with the rustling of leaves and the clucking of chickens and turkeys milling about around us in the dirt, as people continued to trickle in and find their places.<br />
<br />
Finally, Elias, the facilitator, rose and began the necessary and customary preliminaries - Which local language shall we proceed in? Who will translate for the visitors? What is our agenda? Who shall lead the prayer before we begin? After the prayer, the introductions began, going around the circle, at last reaching me, then Ben C-M from Thanksgiving Coffee Company, who had come on his annual trip to the cooperative, and then to Ben Schmerler, visiting from TransfairUSA, the US fairtrade labelling organization, who expressed his happiness at being part of the meeting with these fairtrade coffee farmers by getting up and dancing, instilling the meeting with energy and inspiring the women to clap out a rhythm for him to move to, everyone laughing and smiling at Ben's funky solo dance. It was like a joyful confirmation of collaboration in its truest reality - people supposedly incomprehensible to each other through language or culture, finding common ground and creating something (a rhythm and a dance, or in this case, a trade relationship) together in spite of it. The women in the meeting christened Ben S. "Sanyo", or Smiling Man.<br />
....<br />
During the progress of the meeting, I would be distracted by a movement in the corner of my eye, over my right shoulder. It was a turkey. It had wandered over and begun puffing itself up, edging closer to the back of Ben C-M's chair, and then backing off and relaxing its plumage. Repeating this over and over, the turkey would make threatening gestures to Ben, who sat with his attention rapt on the meeting, complete oblivious to his aggressor, even as the turkey gobbled intimidatingly at his back. This turkey had a grudge against Ben, maybe because it knew that Ben was an American and in just a couple of weeks millions of its turkey brethren would be slaughtered for the annual Thanksgiving feast.Heather Putnamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16889237553116709104noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6719345768538863348.post-26082803989031831002009-11-16T08:47:00.000-06:002009-11-16T08:47:51.307-06:00Tearing Down Thomas Friedman (as it should be)<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"></span><br />
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</tbody></table><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Hi Everybody, </span><br />
<span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I am reposting below (with permission) an email that was sent by Brenda Baletti, a Geographer and PhD candidate at UNC, Chapel Hill, to the listserve of the CLAG (Conference of Latin American Geographers). She addresses some very important and interesting issues that cross with some of my work and the work of many of my colleagues, responding to Thomas Friedman's op-ed piece in the New York Times on 11 November. Comments are welcome, of course.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Heather</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">...</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><div><i>Hi all, </i></div><div><i>I realize that I am probably preaching to the converted, but I am mid-fieldwork in exactly the region from where Friedman wrote an op-ed piece yesterday about the possibilities for Amazonian conservation and I feel the need to respond:</i></div><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/11/opinion/11friedman.html?_r=1&emc=eta1" style="color: #0000cc;" target="_blank"><i>http://www.nytimes.com/2009/</i><i><wbr></wbr>11/11/opinion/11friedman.html?</i><i><wbr></wbr>_r=1&emc=eta1</i></a><div><i><br />
</i></div><div><i>In his November 11th op-ed piece, Thomas Friedman argues that while it is too complex and would take too long to change the developed world’s petroleum consumption, a fast and easy solution to our carbon woes is to completely rework economic development in the Brazilian Amazon by investing a large amount of foreign capital into the region. This attitude—that it is too difficult to change our forms of consumption, but we’ll pay them to change theirs—is exactly the brand of paternalist/imperialist logic that has informed development practices in much of the world since World War II and has created many of the problems that Friedman is allegedly seeking to address.</i><span><i> </i></span></div><div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><i>Friedman’s argument is based on the assumption that environmental protection can most effectively be realized through market mechanisms. I agree that the current forms of capitalist development will soon destroy what we think of as “the Amazon”, although I would remind Friedman that the Amazon is more than the “lungs of the world.” His “unending sea of broccoli” is a human landscape. The social consequences of multiple forms of “green” development are devastating the region’s inhabitants. We see this socio-environmental destruction daily in the area that Dr. Friedman is currently visiting with the bauxite mines of ALCOA, Electronorte’s plan to construct five hydroelectric dams in the Tapajós River watershed (among hundreds of others in the Brazilian Amazon), the construction of a Cargill’s massive soy exportation facility on the Amazon River in Santarém, and territorial reordering projects that remap the region in the name of conservation and sustainability but in the service of development, which is proving more each day to be a severe contradiction. Increasingly the conservation areas and the territories of the region’s inhabitants are cut to a fraction of their intended size in order to accommodate the demands of loggers, mineral companies, large farmers, and dam builders. And still, barges of timber leave the “protected areas” at alarming rates. Management plans approved by the state and federal governments allow both legal (although often unethical) and illegal extraction, while the very regulating agencies created to monitor the extraction process look the other way.</i><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><i>Current market-based incentives, advocated for by most international NGOS such as Conservation International and the Nature Conservancy, green-wash this kind of development. All of the corporations listed above are packaging their projects as green development projects, but they are not without the same old development consequences. For example, programs such the “soy moratorium”, which create incentives for soy farmers to farm without deforesting, result in dispossession of small farmers and expansion of monoculture agriculture. The dams that are financed as “green energy” by the very climate legislation to which Dr. Friedman is referring will submerge hundreds of thousands of hectares of forest and displace and dispossess tens of thousands of people. This are just a couple of examples of Dr. Friedman’s market-based solutions.</i><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span lang="EN-US"><i>Friedman’s implication that reducing the number of hectares that smallholder agriculturists have under cultivation by giving them access to international markets for artesenal goods borders on the absurd. First, there is no such large or even medium scale production of such goods in the Tapajós; Dr. Friedman visited one of the few communities in the national forest that produces such goods, and the producers in these communities are only a handful of families (rather than being a small industry that supports 8,000 people as he suggested). Second, this market-based solution raises a direct threat to food sovereignty in the region—who would produce the food that these farmers stop growing in order to have time to make rubber purses? Would it be the industrial farmers that are moving into the region replacing diversified agro-ecologies with monocultures?</i><span><i> </i></span><i>Should these communities really predicate their livelihoods on the tastes and lifestyle choices of wealthy tourists from North America and Europe?</i></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><i>Friedman argues that 46% of the Amazon is “set aside” for indigenous people and conservation. I’m doing research in two such areas in the region where Friedman is visiting and argue that this characterization is flawed. On the same day that Conservation International and Dr. Friedman were chatting with families in the Tapajós National Forest, 65 km to the west on the other side of the Tapajós River, the indigenous and traditional residents of Gleba Nova Olinda were reacting to the forces of development in a very different manner. People from over 40 communities joined together in their</i><span><span><i>rabetas</i></span></span><i> (canoes with outboard motors), closed off the Arapiuns River to timber exportation and sequestered two barges full of timber in a dramatic effort to garner attention and support for their struggle to access territorial rights for indigenous communities and to eliminate logging in the region. When state and federal government agencies recognized the violation of these rights but steadfastly refused to act to correct the situations, the people took environmental enforcement into their own hands, burning the two barges of wood. This dramatic act demonstrated that they would rather destroy the wood than to let their patrimony leave the area in the hands of loggers.</i><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><i>Four months earlier and 100 km to the east, the Brazilian government created the Renascer Extractive Reserve, a conservation area, at half of the original size promised to its inhabitants in order to provide access to primary forests for loggers and to mineral deposits for miners. Since the creation of the reserve on June 5</i><sup><i>th</i></sup><i>, illegal logging activity has increased exponentially. Up to 5000 cubic meters of wood is leaving the reserve PER DAY. Despite countless denunciations through legal channels by residents and their social mediators, the regulating government agencies do nothing as the timber goes down the river to the open market. At this rate, according to a local logger, the wood in the reserve will be gone within just a few months.</i><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><i>In both of these cases the territories of "traditional" people are being severely limited in order to grant territorial rights to loggers developing “sustainable management plans” to take all viable wood out of these areas. These are only two examples of countless situations where the smallholder residents of the Amazon region are robbed of their rights and their patrimony in the name of a sustainable development model that caters to multiple stakeholder interests.</i><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span lang="EN-US"><i>The severe problems of the post-Kyoto debates, the current global economic crisis, and the general collapse of the free market paradigm all indicate that the market-based governance approach that Friedman and most major international environmental NGOs advocate are nearly always insufficient and incorrect. Further, the social and environmental costs of green-washing these market based approaches to conservation are enormous. If countries and organization of the global north truly want to stop destruction of the forests and peoples of tropical regions, the myriad non-market based approaches to conservation must be recognized, valorized, and implemented in these debates about climate change legislation. Many of the people of these regions have a much better knowledge of how to manage these areas then G-20 bureaucrats. The international community can better serve Amazonian conservation by directly engaging in domestic debates rather than using the generalized discourse of “governance” and market based solutions to problems of global consumption patterns. A more reasonable approach is to put pressure on state and national governments to recognize and respect the rights of people to govern themselves and their region in practice rather than just in rhetoric. A more thoughtful paradigm also begins by recognizing that our modes of consumption and of international governance are directly responsible for much of the destruction with which we are all so concerned.</i></span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><i>Santarém, Pará, Brasil</i><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><i>November 12, 2009</i><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><i>Brenda Baletti</i><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span lang="EN-US"><i>University</i></span><span lang="EN-US"><i> of North Carolina, Chapel Hill</i></span><br />
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</div></div></span>Heather Putnamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16889237553116709104noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6719345768538863348.post-18244936225942909072009-11-14T11:06:00.001-06:002009-11-14T11:06:34.547-06:00Humanizing Fair<!--StartFragment--> <br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Grande";">O</span><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">btaining coffee for your French Press is no simple matter. The international coffee trade business – especially the specialty coffee trade – is a complex and delicate web of dialogue that, if done to the satisfaction of everyone involved, has the potential to really contribute to making the world a better place. That is what I like to think of as one of the foundational ideas behind fair trade (either with a capital F and T, or lower-case f and t).</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I know that many of the readers of this blog buy and drink fairtrade certified coffee, because we have a sense that it more directly benefits disadvantaged coffee farmers by offering them a stable market and higher prices. As consumers, we read the stories on the package of how fair trade changed someone’s life, and we see the photos of families in far-off countries. But the hardest thing for us is to go beyond that, to actually stop and ask – is that all? Is there more behind that story? To listen to the people who produce the coffee, cocoa, or tea that we drink every morning, to hear that the reasons fair trade is necessary in the first place are complex and require solutions that extend far beyond higher and more stable prices, although those are definitely important.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I don’t want to write the usual fair trade monologue of how you should be aware of where your food come from – I don’t believe that knowing alone goes far enough; and anyway, there is enough information already on the internet or on your supermarket shelf that you can access if you felt inclined to do so. What I want to write about here is how your efforts to educate yourself about what you consume is part of a complex network of efforts, a grand movement of people, places, and organizations you cannot even imagine; your efforts to change how you consume are instrumental within this movement, and they support a myriad of other pieces of the puzzle of global food trade. Fair trade, then, as a product certification and as a social movement, is a way to connect all of these often-disparate efforts, facilitate dialogue and communication, and to streamline efforts to goals in common.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">In my work in Nicaragua in 2002-2005, and in my work with United Students for Fair Trade in the last three years, I always tried to explore these complex realities and relationships of fairtrade, and also explore how to use them to connect different people, different groups who could collaborate. What I loved about the fairtrade world is that it never stopped with coffee or with any product. I witnessed time and time again how coffee, or its fairtrade-certified status, would bring two random people together in a room at a conference, or in shaded coffee field on a mountain, and out of that meeting would come spectacular ideas, and real, constructive collaborations that continued to blossom long after the visit was over. It always struck me that if we could talk about ourselves as more than coffee farmers, more than coffee drinkers, even as we acknowledged that coffee is what brought us together, we could really help more people to relate to fair trade and its vision of making trade relations more human and more sustainable. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Farmers are not just farmers – they are businessmen, community leaders and organizers, and have countless other roles. Cooperatives become the motors of rural development in places where the government either cannot or will not support development. In Northern Nicaragua, that meant cooperatives taking on roles coordinating projects such as literacy-by-radio campaigns, economic diversification through agroecotourism development, scholarships for children of cooperative members. In Uganda, it means a cooperative being instrumental in creating and building interfaith peace and trust in a community where distrust and conflict goes back a long time. Companies are not only buyers of product – they are bridges, resources, advocates, educators of coffee-drinkers back home. The point is that once we start thinking about each other as more than participants in the value-chain, we have to move away from questions like “does fairtrade work or not?” and towards a vision of collaboration in which we see it as a critical tool that contributes to the goals that we have in common with farmers or businesses, and makes us imagine more creatively how we can all collaborate…</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Okay, enough of my ranting. I will write later this week about Peace Kawomera’s recent visit from Ben Corey-Moran from Thanksgiving Coffee and Ben Schmerler from TransfairUSA – It was an exciting and fun visit!</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Also, speaking of collaboration (and great coffee!), please support Peace Kawomera cooperative by purchasing their coffee! (My birthday is coming up, so do it for me!). Go to the link on the right sidebar of this blog, or go directly to </span><a href="http://store.thanksgivingcoffee.com/product_info?products_id=29"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">http://store.thanksgivingcoffee.com/product_info?products_id=29</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Mwebere! (Thanks! In Luganda)</span><o:p></o:p></span><br />
</div><!--EndFragment-->Heather Putnamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16889237553116709104noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6719345768538863348.post-27794648480197502332009-11-05T04:03:00.000-06:002009-11-05T04:03:25.373-06:00In between a motorcycle and a truck...You might already know via Facebook that I got into an accident on a motorcycle on Monday morning. I don't remember exactly how it happened or how i got the scrapes and bruises I ended up with, but I do remember that Muhammad the bodaboda driver that picks me up every morning to take me to Peace Kawomera's office outside the city in Namanyonyi, was paused on the highway outside Mbale to make a right-hand turn onto the dirt road that leads to Namanyonyi (we drive on the left here). I remember seeing a truck speeding up behind us on our right side, feeling it hit me, and next thing I knew I was several feet away lying on the asphalt. I got up and moved to the side of the road, dazed, and watched Muhammad pick up the motorcycle and move it to the side as well, his right hand dripping blood onto the blacktop.<br />
I noticed a scrape on my arm, and my leg was sore, but nothing seemed broken or seriously injured. People kept coming up to me and saying "Sorry", and a young woman stood by me and commented on what was going on, as Muhammad and others ran back and forth, seemingly negotiating or arguing with each other, though I would not understand what they were saying. After what I think was a good number of minutes of just standing there dazed, Muhammad waved me over, put me back on the motorcycle and drove me to Namanyonyi, where I worked the rest of the morning until going to a farmer group meeting in the afternoon. I did end up with two gigantic purple bruises on both sides of my right knee, though I cannot for the life of me figure out what managed to hit me on both sides of my knee at the same time. But, I am fine, working a normal schedule, and getting very nervous every morning when I have to get on the motorcycle to go to Peace Kawomera. But, life goes on...Heather Putnamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16889237553116709104noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6719345768538863348.post-62759566615030141032009-11-01T02:13:00.001-06:002009-11-01T03:50:40.713-06:00A Day in the Life...<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande'; font-size: 10pt;">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. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande'; font-size: 10pt;">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.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande'; font-size: 10pt;">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.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande'; font-size: 10pt;">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. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande'; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-size: small;">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.</span> 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.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande';"><span style="font-size: small;">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. </span></span><br />
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</div>Heather Putnamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16889237553116709104noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6719345768538863348.post-5103802086703733242009-10-24T06:27:00.001-05:002009-10-24T06:45:59.942-05:00From Nangoro to Mbale<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I made the move into my new apartment in Mbale city on Thursday, spending the entire afternoon running around the center and the market buying the basics—a bed, a paraffin stove, etc. I was sad to leave the Keki family, but I will of course be visiting them often. I am now installed in a one-room, fourth-floor apartment above a gas station, just outside the center on the road to Kampala. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Before transplanting myself from Nangoro Village to Mbale, the older Keki children took me on a hike to Bugwemagumbo, a cave formed of large rock slabs jutting out of the top of a hill near Nangoro village.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">During Idi Amin’s regime, when the Abayudayah (literally, “the Jews” in the Luganda language) community of Mbale region were prohibited from practicing their faith, and all of their synagogues were forcefully closed, people would go to the Bugwemagumbo cave in secret to recite prayers on the Sabbath.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">The walls of the cave are burnt black by smoke and looking closely, one can make out faded drawings of the Star of David and a menorah.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Praying in the cave was an immense risk that the community took, since they would have been killed by Amin’s soldiers had they been caught, but it can be said today that the cave was instrumental in the survival of the Abayudayah and their traditions through the Amin regime.</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Peace Kawomera cooperative is an interfaith cooperative of Jews, Muslims, and Christians that currently is experiencing an incredible amount of change.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">They are in the midst of constructing a new office and storage facility, whereas up to now they were renting an office space.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">They are strengthening their members’ production base through a coffee seedling project, improving coffee quality and quality consistency with the installation of a new centralized coffee depulping and washing station.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Most inspiring to me is their approach to member capacity-building through the formation of small producer groups.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">These groups are beginning to go through Farmer Field School-style trainings facilitated by six newly-appointed facilitators, who are themselves farmers.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">The cooperative is also launching a Savings and Credit Program, in which members will be able to save and have access to small credit lines.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">This is just a small sample of the current and future projects that the young and visionary management and staff of Peace Kawomera have in the works, and I will blog more about them as I learn more.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I have to say that I feel like I have come at the perfect moment to work with Peace Kawomera, and that I am lucky to be able to participate in the realization of these dreams that will result in a self-sustaining cooperative that truly serves, and belongs to, its members.</span><br />
<!--StartFragment--> <div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Peace Kawomera is not only interfaith, it is intertribal. Its members and staff are mostly Bugisu and Banyole, but also Basoga and Luganda, although Lugandans are a minority in this region. And I am sure that there are more tribes in this region than I know of right now. This means, as you can imagine, that there are as many languages being spoken as there are tribes. It is, as John Bosco, the agronomist at the cooperative, told me, “like a linguistic village – a farmer can use six languages in two sentences, and everyone will understand him”. Of course, I will not understand him. The little Kiswahili that I have studied has been of limited use here, only helping me to catch some words now and then when people are speaking around me. But, I have resolved to find a teacher to give me lessons in Luganda once a week, so that I can at least communicate the basics to people who do not speak English, as Luganda is essentially the lingua franca in this region.</span><br />
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</div>Heather Putnamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16889237553116709104noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6719345768538863348.post-82474513842393580222009-10-21T02:21:00.002-05:002009-10-21T02:27:07.124-05:00Finally, some photos!So the internet seems to stop working at sunset here in Nangoro, but the payoff is that it is unusually fast this morning, so I can post some photos! (Sorry for the weird layout - I am trying to figure out the formatting in Blogger)<br />
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<div style="text-align: left;">This is Zilpa, one of JJ's daughters, showing me her grandmother's coffee and peanuts on the drying tray outside the house. <br />
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</div><div style="text-align: left;">This is Sampson, driving me across Jinja Dam, with the Nile River in the background.<br />
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</div>And this is Mama Miriam and some members of the Keki family in the family home.<br />
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</div><div style="text-align: left;">Pumping water.<br />
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</div>Heather Putnamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16889237553116709104noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6719345768538863348.post-27323504894775573172009-10-20T07:55:00.001-05:002009-10-20T07:57:12.625-05:00Life in Nangoro so far<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande';"><span style="font-size: small;">The last few days of adjustment and learning have alternated between moments of intense intake of information and calm moments where I have nothing to do but sit and watch what goes on around me. This is definitely a time of absorption, which is natural, although it has been a challenge to get used to doing what feels like nothing for extended periods of time. </span><span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande';"><span style="font-size: small;">I am so happy that Samson brought me directly to Nangoro village the day I arrived, without so much as stopping in Mbale. I have been able to participate in and observe daily life here on JJ’s farm, and get a good idea of what goes on here. The farm is incredibly diverse, as I saw on my walk with Zilpa yesterday. Of course there is coffee, but around, under, and above the coffee there is vanilla, beans, rice, maize, mango trees, papayas, bananas and plantains, guavas, jackfruit, peanuts, tomatoes, eggplant, pumpkins, and greens, and probably much more that I have not yet seen, or that I cannot recognize. For instance, in her grandmother’s garden, Zilpa showed me a patch of small plants laden with little, round, bright-red cherries that looked like a cross between a round chile pepper and a mini-tomato. She said that the old people grew them and cooked them with greens, but that they were bitter and she did not like them at all. I bit into one, and yes, it was bitter with a hint of spice, but mostly bitter. Who knows what it is?</span><span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande';"><span style="font-size: small;">For all of this production, people are constantly working. The coffee harvest began a week ago Monday, so the older boys go out every morning (except Saturday, when they go to Synagogue in the morning and study the Torah and other texts in the afternoon) to pick coffee, taking advantage of the next few weeks they will be home before they return to school for exams. The younger children are at the local school, and the older girls stay at home to do the work of the house and to take care of the drying of the current bean harvest. I spend most of my time so far with Zilpa and Stacy, both fifteen years old, but they too will return on Thursday to boarding school. Here on the farm it is a constant, steady rhythm of activity.</span><span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande';"><span style="font-size: small;">When I actually went into Mbale on Saturday night with Kakaire and Aziz (two young and hip brothers who work for Peace Kawomera and live in Mbale) to eat out and go to a local club for a beer afterwards. At the restaurant, we watched the tail end of the Liverpool-Sunderland soccer game (or “Loserpool” as Aziz called the team, since he is most loyally a Manchester fan). The club we went to after dinner was full of young people drinking ginger beer or various Ugandan beers, and chatting over the music, which varied from American hip-hop to African reggaeton to (wait for it) that song “Africa” that we all loved in the 1980s (who sings that?). Oh, the irony.</span><span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande';"><span style="font-size: small;">I was amused to notice how shocked I was at how liberal the city is, compared to rural areas, not because I expected it to be as conservative as the village, but because I was used to the village. My two days in the village had accustomed me to seeing women with their heads covered and in long skirts, and to the deeply religious nature of the people in the village as well, Muslim, Christian, and Jewish. I could have laughed at my own internal reaction to seeing women drinking beer in the club we went to. But tradition and religion are not absent in the city by any means – a couple of people in the club chose to sit outside on the patio where it was dark and empty because, they said, “we are Muslims, and if people saw us drinking beer, they would say, ‘You are Muslim and drinking beer – how is this?’, and it is better not to raise such questions”. </span><span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande';"><span style="font-size: small;">But I liked what I saw of the city: it is busy without being frantic, full of vendors on the sidewalks and people of all shapes and sizes and dress, walking or riding bikes or bodabodas (motorcycle taxis). Hopefully I will find an apartment there this week, and can explore it further. </span><span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
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</div>Heather Putnamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16889237553116709104noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6719345768538863348.post-88535672537766053872009-10-19T09:09:00.000-05:002009-10-19T09:09:28.294-05:00One photo<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Sinee it took over an hour to upload this photo, and I was unsuccessful after 3 hours of trying to upload others, I have only this one photo for you, which shows five of the children of the Keki family, in whose home I am staying in Nangoro Village.<br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1qODPIl9dWs75QE8I33KSd2eZGkv9MHziUHoKuOWI32-moi1UHXPakxZau2o1RuvrroJeIzQq-p1qpZBMW18m_Bbi78UN7qW1F6IjvCKWjVhJtjlisyD37MqnofYDh9XM5ZOB0K-5GQg/s1600-h/DSC03041.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1qODPIl9dWs75QE8I33KSd2eZGkv9MHziUHoKuOWI32-moi1UHXPakxZau2o1RuvrroJeIzQq-p1qpZBMW18m_Bbi78UN7qW1F6IjvCKWjVhJtjlisyD37MqnofYDh9XM5ZOB0K-5GQg/s320/DSC03041.JPG" width="320" /></a><br />
</div>Heather Putnamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16889237553116709104noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6719345768538863348.post-19535471084313247772009-10-17T06:42:00.000-05:002009-10-17T06:42:55.477-05:00First Impressions...<span style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande'; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span><!--StartFragment--><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Waking up after my first day and night in Nangoro, I feel a lot less overwhelmed than I did after arriving yesterday. The rest helped, I am sure.</span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">First impressions.</span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I was met at the airport by Samson, who has a tourism agency called Shalom Safaris, and who is from the same community where I am now. We left Entebbe yesterday and passed through the suburbs and center of Kampala in bumper-to-bumper traffic that increased our journey by at least an hour or two. I fell asleep after that but awoke upon reaching Jinja, and the Nile River. I had seen the Nile from the airplane, and now here it was in front of me, and below me as we crossed the river on the hydroelectric damn and entered the papyrus swamps that result from the runoff from Mt. Elgon in the Eastern Region of Uganda.</span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">The drive continued, the road always flanked by towns and villages, houses, traditional round mud huts with layered stick roofs (much cooler than the modern houses with corrugated iron sheet roofs), shops, children in school uniforms in colors spanning the rainbow, women in bright, elaborately tied dresses and headscarves or in Muslim head-coverings, men in western dress or in flowing long white kanzus. As we proceeded, a large mountain loomed ahead of us, and began to take on the form of a large mushroom erupting suddenly out of a flat plain – this was Mt. Elgon, 2000 meters tall. Continuing, the mountain became the foreground of a long and high mountain range that extended westward.</span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">After some time, we began gradually climbing the foothills of Mt. Elgon, and arrived to Mbale city, a bustling little city whose center square is dominated by a hot-pink clock tower (I promise to get some fotos of this in the future so you know I am not lying.). We climbed four kilometers more over a potholed and winding road, passing houses, shaded coffee fields, banana trees, beans, and maize, and reached the house of JJ Keki, the director of Peace Kawomera cooperative.</span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">During my first afternoon, I met most of JJ’s twenty-five natural and adopted children (not an exaggeration), whose names I promptly forgot. I spent the afternoon hanging out with the children and talking with JJ, figuring out how to use the toilet (before JJ showed me the western-style one inside) and generally just getting used to the idea of being here. I have to say that I was overwhelmed, absolutely overwhelmed, probably from exhaustion from the journey by air and land all the way from London. I actually fell asleep at 7pm, but was awakened at 830pm by Stacy, one of the daughters, to eat supper. So I sat down with JJ and ate a plantain mash, beans, rice and greens, quite filling. Then I laid back down and fell asleep again, not waking until 9am this morning.</span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">By the time I woke today, JJ and the older children had left for Synagogue, as today is Sabbat. I hung out with the kids until Aziz, one of the young professionals that works with the cooperative, showed up. We chatted for a bit and then he took me to see the cooperative’s new office, which is under construction just down the road from JJ’s place. Once it is finished, it will be complete with storage and offices, as well as a larger-capacity mechanical coffee depulping machine, which I gathered was installed about five weeks ago. Aziz also showed me the fermenting tank and drying trays where the current harvest is busily being processed. I showed Aziz some fotos of coffee production in Nicaragua and Brazil, and we were impressed by the similarities and differences in production and processing methods between those two countries and Uganda - all producing the same product!</span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">After Aziz left, I went to hang out with the kids again; this is a major part of my research plan, as you will probably already have not</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">ed! One of them, a young girl named Shirin, braided my hair into tight little braids. I have to say, it looks better on Ugandans than on me. Otherwise, I am struggling with language, as people here sometimes speak Luganda, sometimes</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> some other tribal language, and some of them speak English. I am putting my Swahili to work trying to understand and learn some Luganda, so we will see where that goes. I am also working off of satellite internet here, which is very slow. The result is that I am having trouble uploading fotos into the blog, so this post is not accompanied by images, unfortunately. I will keep trying, however, to get some fotos up for you soon, so you have images to accompany the stories.</span><br />
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</div><!--StartFragment--> <!--EndFragment--> <!--EndFragment--> </span></span>Heather Putnamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16889237553116709104noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6719345768538863348.post-11371018628779344162009-10-11T12:36:00.001-05:002009-10-11T12:37:55.507-05:00Journey to UgandaMy 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.<br />
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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: "<em>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?"</em><br />
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Yes, what was the evolution of this adventure? Why Uganda? How Uganda? So here starts the real meat of this blog...<br />
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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.<br />
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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. :) <br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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. <br />
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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 <a href="http://www.mirembekawomera.com/cooperative">http://www.mirembekawomera.com/cooperative</a>. You will see, as Paul wrote in his email to me, that "<em>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 .</em>" 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: <a href="http://store.thanksgivingcoffee.com/product_info?products_id=29">http://store.thanksgivingcoffee.com/product_info?products_id=29</a>.<br />
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That was my (life)journey to Uganda...Stay tuned for more!Heather Putnamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16889237553116709104noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6719345768538863348.post-10665062035647301752009-10-09T10:41:00.000-05:002009-10-09T10:41:08.453-05:00the rain in Devon...The rain has been falling steadily here in Kenton all day, a steady backdrop to the twice-hourly ringing of the bells of the church next door to Kerry's house. Kenton is a village of about 2000 people near Exeter, where the university is. Coming back to Exeter after leaving here in May of 2008 has been eye-opening - seeing familiar faces and places through the lense of time passed allows me to remember the place with more calm than I think I experienced it the first time around. I am less nervous now and not going through the culture shock I think I went through the first time I was in England. It is good to talk with friends and mentors here that I have not seen in a long time, and to see how people and places have changed and how they have stayed the same.<br />
I will be in Devon until Monday, when I travel to Bournemouth for the night to visit a friend there, and then back to London on Tuesday. I leave for Uganda on Thursday the 15th...Heather Putnamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16889237553116709104noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6719345768538863348.post-86021424610642109782009-10-06T07:36:00.000-05:002009-10-06T07:36:16.229-05:00On the road again...Hello friends,<br />
l arrived safely to London after traveling from Atlanta via plane, train, and tube. It is what I would consider to be a typical London day - cool and misty - and I am sitting in the London Central Hostel, tired and really wanting a shower, but happy to be here. My room isn't quite ready yet, but they have an espresso machine, which is great because there was something wrong with the water supply on the British Airlines flight I took over, so there was NO COFFEE on the flight! The horror...<br />
So I am here writing you and enjoying a nice cappuccino here in the lobby of the hostel in Central London. <br />
Tomorrow I take the train to Exeter, where I will be meeting up with old friends from my time in Exeter in 2007, so it promises to be awesome!<br />
I will keep you posted (and I promise these posts will get much more interesting - I just wanted to let my mom know I was okay!)...Heather Putnamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16889237553116709104noreply@blogger.com2