Just Coffee Cooperative

Boda Bodas, Uganda’s famed motorcycle taxis, bicycles, and people meander the streets in Mbale town, setting out on their morning tasks. Signs of development organizations with nice
vehicles clearly displaying their organizations’ logos are present throughout this city of nearly 100,000 residents that lies just across the border from Kenya. I observe advertisements for air time, muslim mosques, Indian restaurants, informal economies, the busy coming and going of people. We take the rough, eroded road that leads north to Sudan past meandering cows and goats, plantains set for sale in the marketplace, and women and children swinging their hoes in small plots of land. The city quickly fades to country, and the pace slows down.Homes of adobe huts and corrugated tin lying atop brick walls become more and more spaced apart. Here the dirt that paves the mountain roads carries a red tint, a subtle reminder that I’m across the ocean this time. We climb up with the potholes, which keep us from cruising at a faster pace. The road seems to get worse and the views substantially better. It is day two and we’re heading out for another Gumutindo society. Today we will be meeting with Jennipher and her cooperative in the Nusufwa society.

We’re really far out here I think to myself, and my mind wanders back to the number of hours it’s taken to get here, and it takes me a minute to calculate it all. We decide to stop to take a picture at a curve in the road, each side carved out of a red-black tinted rock wall decorated with greenery and waterfalls. Conveniently, the Land Cruiser decided to take a break too as we’re gawking at the geology of the land. The rough road left it overheated, causing an extra pit stop for us.  Lydia says its “the worst thing that has ever happened” to her while we calmly wait it out on the side of the road, greeting barefoot farmers passing by. The wee little nearby waterfall serves as a coolant, saving our ride and before long we were on our way. You can’t expect to travel to coffee country without having at least one vehicle malfunction...

“You are most welcome.” The male farmers congregate in a simple concrete building on the edge of the red dirt road in Demukata Society, about an hour up the mountain from Mbale town. As we enter the humble space, there is nothing hanging on the pale yellow walls and all of our shoes have filled with a thick, red mud now that the rainy season has settled into a constant rhythm, after only two weeks of showing her face again. A rushing river lined with Eucalyptus trees flows behind our meeting space, and the lush green peaks of Mt. Elgon lay beyond it. Patchwork squares of treeless land are carved out of the mountains, their rich soil filled with beans and corn and plantains, as far as I can see. There is a small meeting space that sits next to the river, made up of a few wood posts, a tin roof, dried grasses that make up the walls, and their broken pieces that decorate the dirt floor, a simple black chalkboard, and wooden benches. It’s a school, with a few lingering, smiling children, their eyes bright and engaged, practicing their English to the visiting Mzungus.

We had arrived to Mbale town last night after a long journey from Chicago to Amsterdam, Rwanda, Entebbe, to Kampala. This was our first full day in this new territory, but we found ourselves in a place with people who spoke our same language--that is, the language of cooperatives, fair trade, organic, small farmers, and of course; coffee-- and through that bond, we were able to feel right at home (or right in coffee country...). The staff of Gumutindo Coffee Cooperative warmly took us under their wing, leading us out to the societies sparsely located through the hills of Mt. Elgon, through the streets of Mbale and offered us a deeper look at Uganda through the context of coffee. It was a first time visit to Uganda for our Cooperative Coffees delegation of three and we had come to meet the farmers, to further our relationship and learn about what happens on the ground.

Sure there were different colors, different shaped houses, different languages, but the hectic streets, the rural villages, and the spaces between all had a similar overall feel to other coffee country landscapes I’ve visited throughout Latin America. Alongside the staff of Gumutindo, I quickly learned that any unease I had arrived with was immediately calmed when we reached Mbale. It felt safe compared with most of my travels through Central America, and I was surprised by how comfortable I was upon arrival.

Join Just Coffee Cooperative for a series of community events during the week of October 26th-November 1st. Cristian Dolores Guzman Marlos will be joining us from La FEM in Esteli, Nicaragua to meet community members and share with us the wonderful work of La FEM.

Throughout the week, we will be updating our community on what Just Coffee as well as our producer partners have been up do. And with many changes in the fair trade movement as of late, we would like to include consumers and other community members into the conversation, so come out and join us (especially on Saturday!!).

The weeks events include:

Wednesday, October 26th: UW Green House Event

7-9 pm

Presentation by Just Coffee and La FEM

UW Green House Den Cole Hall

Free coffee provided

Friday, October 28th: Family Farm Defenders Farm tour (Bison, mushroom, dairy, CSA Farm)

Meet at Just Coffee at 9:00 am if interested in joining us!

1129 E. Wilson St.

Saturday, October 29th:

CELEBRATION PARTY AT JUST COFFEE WORLD HEADQUARTERS!!

August marked the second of many Farmer to Farmer exchanges and the end of a summer filled with thousands of miles of travel. The last stop took me to Piura, Peru to spend some time with CEPICAFE, a cooperative well known throughout the country for their success in diversification efforts with cacao, coffee, sugar, fruit production, ecotourism, and carbon capturing. As a larger secondary level cooperative, CEPICAFE works to organize 400 small organizations, grouping together 7000 total producers in the northern region of this South American country. During these troubled high market times, a trio made up of myself, Ariel Chait, an Information and Technology graduate student from Berkeley, and Clay Roper, a roaster from Third Coast Coffee Roasting Company in Austin, Texas joined forces to participate in an exchange between Cooperative Coffees and CEPICAFE. We had come to focus on fair trade strategies, participate in a roasting workshop, as well as developing an internal inventory management software to help the coop manage real-time their production flow and tracking.