Expectations

As I’ve been back in the US for about a week, I’ve been answering a lot of questions for friends and family about what life is like in Cameroon and how different life is between the two places. (People also ask what it is I do over there, so apparently this blog was not as well advertised as I had thought it was) People want to know if I’m going through a lot of ‘counter-culture’ shock, like is it disorienting to see so many cars or such huge markets or so many white people all at once. To answer briefly, it is. To answer the question a little more comprehensively, it’s not as though I forgot what life was like in the US but I certainly got used to living a different way.

I am realizing that when I return to Cameroon, I am going to be re-entering with a very different set of expectations than I first arrived with. Landing in Africa, I was probably expecting something out of Gulliver’s travels. People walking on their hands or talking hippopotami, perhaps. When you start off expecting such oddities and are really only faced with a few different ways to cook and eat corn, some creative (or old-timey) solutions to living without electricity/running water/personal transportation, or variations on the theme of ‘existing power structures’ (which essentially amount to, some people have it [and want to keep it], some people don’t [and want to have it]) the relative bizarreness gets downgraded.

Additionally, by the time I left the US in 2011, I had gotten my life to a point where I felt pretty comfortable with my lifestyle and carbon footprint (then I got on a plane...) and I had already shunned or tried to do without many of the modern conveniences my friends and family figure a person would miss most. Seasonal food choices were already a part of my life; if I wasn’t renting a fairly small apartment I probably would have had a composting toilet; I used public transport and/or craigslist rideshares to get just about anywhere; I got most of my clothes from the Salvation Army (and the clothes market in village is essentially the same thing). So I was maybe a little less disposed toward the initial shock.

That being said, what jumped out at me soon after arriving back in PA is the aesthetic choices that are taken for granted here but do not hold the same prominence in Cameroon. The appearance of lawns, flower beds, paintings on the walls, furniture, architecture styles, public green space, and so on are all choices that people make on a daily basis with an eye towards form as much as function. The range of options available is wide enough to let anyone express themselves (though most people stick to a pretty conventional pallet). From what I have seen in Cameroon people would make interesting and unique choices but are very limited both in time and materials. Occasionally you’ll catch someone dressing up the area around their home with some trees and flowers just for the sake of a little color, just not as ubiquitous as I’m seeing now. Similarly, everyone in Oku is happy to get their hands on a new calendar or photo to put on their wall to liven up their living room, but a print or oil-painting is pretty much out of the question. (Incidentally, I did pick up a few oil paintings from a Kumbo artist named Jean Samuel Mfikela and they have gotten a good reception from friends and family)

On the flip side, I got a few good reminders that frustrations are not unique to the African continent. In the past week, my parents have been going through a series of complicated hoops to make settlement on a new house. A complicated process, no one would argue that, but when I hear that the process is being held up because a document in one lawyer’s office needs to be signed by another lawyer, both of whom have internet connections, mobiles phones, fax machines, and access to three private document delivery services in addition to the United States Postal Service, one gets the feeling that it isn’t just a question of technology when it still takes a few days to get that signature. In a similar vein, my sister’s fiance (an Irish bloke) was navigating his own immigration adventure at the US embassy in Dublin recently and got pushed back a full day because he didn’t bring a self-addressed postage paid envelope with him to his morning meeting with the officials there. So for as many times as I and my friends and co-workers get into a snag and want to throw our hands up and say, ‘well, that’s Cameroon for you,’ it was nice to be reminded that maybe we ought to just say, ‘well, that’s living in the 21^st century for you,’ instead.

A Brief Respite

In one weeks’ time I’m going to be flying back to the US for a month long break. I’m very excited about it. After that, I’ll be returning to Oku to keep working on the organic coffee program for another year. During the last couple of months of that year I’ll be working to phase myself out of the program and train someone to replace me. Since I’m about to leave for a few weeks, this is not a great time to start new things, but there is still so much untapped potential here in Oku that I think I’ll just write a list of some things I hope to accomplish in the next year. Here goes.

1. Get the volume of organic coffee produced in Oku up to 9 tons (from the 3ish we are hoping for this year).

2. Revisit all of the farmers that we interviewed for field entry, but didn’t get to do internal inspections for. Make sure they are still interested and get them on our roster for 2013.

3. Begin a fair and transparent waiting list for farmers that would like to join the group and become certified organic.

4. Hold a general meeting of our farmer-partners to encourage greater autonomy and self-assessment within the program. This should become an at least annual event.

5. Have at least 9 compost piles (one in each village) being actively and successfully managed.

6. Have at least 9 fields (one in each village) featuring a significant cover crop.

7. Identify (or create) some market streams for organic inputs that are not easy or possible for farmers to obtain right now: top of the list are at least one organic fertilizer option (like blood/bone meal), botanical pesticides (like neem or derris root [thoughts on that anyone?]), and companion crop seeds.

8. Continue monthly training meetings and have an attendance rate of at least 50% of farmer-partners each month with each farmer-partner attending at least 50% of meetings in 2013 (Does that sound like a really low bar to anyone else? Maybe we’ll revise that up around May or June).

9. Begin training a replacement for myself from 4-months before my scheduled departure. This will take a few intermediate steps like: find a field of suitable applicants to take on the job of ‘Director of Organic Certification’ (awesome title, right?) and hiring an assistant from that pool.

Plucking (aka harvesting)

As of now, mid-November, the harvest of Arabica coffee is happening everywhere coffee is grown in Oku. Since Oku is not uniform geographically or climatically, there are villages down in the valleys where the berries get ripe earlier (Mbam or Ngham, for example) and up high in the hills where red berries only show up a few weeks later (Emlah or Jiyane, say). Coffee is on just about everyone’s mind, either because they have their own coffee to harvest and process or they want to try to buy some coffee now while the price is low and make a little profit in a few weeks when the price inflates a bit.

I’ve spent a few mornings with people plucking a few baskets of cherries. As with most things, I’m slow. Not as slow as when I was picking the specialty beans at the mill back in May, but pretty slow. But it’s nice to have someone else in the field with you when you’re doing work like this, so I’m sure no one minds. At least I’m good at not dropping the berries, which would probably annoy people.

This may all be cryptic to anyone who hasn’t been close to coffee trees, so let’s back up. Arabica coffee is harvested a few times over the course of a season, because the cherries do not ripen all at the same time. Harvesters select only the ripened berries (or pretty close to ripened berries) and leave the green berries on the stem to continue maturing. This is a little tricky because coffee berries grow in clusters and are attached to the tree by a little forked stem (the peduncle) so when you try to pluck a single ripe berry it is easy to detach at least one or two unripe ones you didn’t mean to. Then they drop on the ground and its a pain to bend over to retrieve them and sometimes a pain to find them in the grass. This is why farmers here see clearing the weeds from the field as a necessary prerequisite to starting the harvest season.

I know that in other parts of the world, harvesters will go out to the field with matts or skirts to place under the trees during harvest to catch these wayward fruits, but here (I’ll say this with nothing to back me up) each tree yields so little and you move through the field so quickly that the time needed to lay down a skirt and constantly move it wouldn’t be reasonable. On the other hand, if you read up on Coffee Berry Disease (the scourge of the crop here) removing diseased berries from the field is recommended pretty much unanimously and using a skirt during harvesting can make that a lot easier.

When you do get the berries you want in your hand, you drop them in your basket or sac and move on to the next ones. If you ask someone around here how much coffee they harvested today, they’ll answer you with some number of ‘tins’, by which they mean 20-liter buckets. Later these same tins become the basic unit of measure for how much parchment coffee a person has to sell. When we are talking about well dried parchment, a tin can be estimated as about 9kgs and about seven tins will fill one sac. Meanwhile, two tins of berries eventually become about one tin of dry parchment (after you remove the cherry and dry the bean).

Control

Control

This past week, I (partially we, but I think I need to take as much responsibility for this as possible) decided to sanction a group of growers. That means that we are not going to buy any of their coffee as organic this year and that we will give them a set of corrective actions they will need to perform in order to leave the dreaded list of ‘Sanctioned Growers’. It is likely that their field will also be reverted to in-conversion status, forcing them to wait another three years before their coffee can be regarded as organic, I’ll take a little more time to decide if this part is necessary. This group gets the dubious distinction of being the first people to be sanctioned by Mocha Joes Organic Growers...congratulations. 

What happened is that these guys got hung up on something we said early on while publicizing the program: that we were limiting the number of growers we would work with in any area to five. They are all close family members and they all control small parts of what used to be their father’s (or uncle’s or grandfather’s, it’s hard to get precise details on lineage here) field. This is no problem, we were happy to map the whole field and include all of their coffee in the program. The hitch showed up this week when one of these growers told us that someone had used herbicide in a small portion of the field. The following line of questioning ensued (approximately):

“Who used herbicide?”

“Alfred.”

“I don’t know Alfred, why would he use herbicide in your field?”

“Well it is his portion.”

“But I’ve never met Alfred, how could his portion be in this program?”

“Well, his portion is just in the middle, and you said we were limited to five people, so we thought we would just make sure Alfred understood all the rules and...”

“So how many people share this field?”

“Eight.”

“Holy shit.”

This is a strange situation in that the more I think about it, the more bananas it seems to be. Also, the more cut and dry that the growers involved were acting in a way that risked the integrity of our organic product. Enter the Internal Control System – Let’s reference our handy ICS Manual (yeah, we’ve got one of those) and see what it says...ah, here it is:

Another kind of control, using flags to separate fields.

State of Non-compliance - The farmer engages in an action that risks the integrity of his/her organic production (e.g. storing treated products with organic coffee, spraying crops with equipment used for agrochemicals) and reports this to a field officer or Internal Inspector.

Result - The farmer is not sanctioned. Products that may be affected may not be purchased as organic and any fields that may be affected are reverted to in-conversion status.

Maybe these guys don’t need to be sanctioned after all. On the other hand, maybe this other article more accurately describes the situation:

State of Non-compliance - The farmer engages in an action that risks the integrity of his/her organic production (e.g. storing treated products with organic coffee, spraying crops with equipment used for agrochemicals) and this action is discovered by a field officer or Internal Inspector.  

Result - The farmer is temporarily sanctioned. An investigation is performed to determine if the farmer knowingly risked the integrity of the organic program. If yes, the farmer is permanently sanctioned and excluded from the program. If not, the farmer is proscribed corrective measures to guard against a similar event and the farmer's entire operation is reverted to in-conversion status. Following completion of the corrective measures the sanction is lifted. If the farmer remains temporarily sanctioned for more than one year they are permanently sanctioned.

Granted, the farmers did tell me about the spraying of the herbicide, but it did require some small investigation on my part to determine that this field was a veritable clown car of hidden growers. I don’t feel that these farmers were knowingly risking the integrity of the product; they were just acting very irresponsibly. Does this situation fall somewhere in between the two descriptions above? Kind of, but definitely leaning toward the later. So, I guess I’ll be breaking the bad news to these guys in the next couple of days; no organic coffee for them until 2016. Not the funnest part of my job.

We're Pretty Darn Close...

Last week we were visited by our external auditors, EcoCert. They sent a team of two people: Jean-Pierre, whom I mentioned before as the man who would be acting as our primary inspectors, and Aziz, the manager of the EcoCert office in Burkina Faso who was really more interested in observing the work of JP than us, but also contributed some questions here and there.

It was a three and a half day event that saw me move back and forth from Oku to Bamenda a few times, which is a blast. The end result is that we are technically denied right now, pending some changes we need to make, none of which should be terribly difficult for us (mostly questions of documentation). The most obtrusive is that we need to make an effort to prove that our farmers have actually undergone the three year transition period which is a pre-requisite for producing a certified product. There is a precedent that a farmer can use the three years prior to when they apply for certification as this conversion period if they can provide sufficient evidence that they did not use any unallowed chemicals. In our situation, since our farmers are not in the habit of keeping records, we are going to rely on their formal attestation of their field history backed up by an assurance from the local Chief of the Agricultural Post (the Cameroon equivalent of a state extension agent in the US) that their statement is true. Again, precedent is apparently on our side with this. More importantly, as far as I can tell it is the truth that all of our farmers have abstained from using unallowed inputs on the farms we are seeking certification for. It would be a shame that these people would miss out on this opportunity on a technicality.

Throughout our inspection, all of us (me, Philip, Cassman, Gilbert, and the farmers) were impressed by the manner JP and Aziz conducted themselves and their investigation. At the first farm we visited together, JP asked me to perform a ‘mock’ inspection, since we had already done the official one the week before. He observed me and afterward gave me some critiques. Some were positive (and as a testament to his skills as a teacher/manager he started with these) and some were constructively critical. Mostly, he encouraged me to change the way I ask questions in order to open them up and let the farmers explain more to me about how they are managing their farms. Hearing this, I couldn’t help but agree, but also had the thought in my head that maybe that kind of questioning wouldn’t work with these particular farmers. That was a foolish thing for me to think. Over the next two days, JP showed that you can get just about any information you want from a farmer with very simple, very open questions. Something along the lines of, “So how do you take care of your farm?” could lead to about 10 minutes of explanation that would have taken me an hour to pry out of these guys. I’ll be trying to put this into practice more myself and I’ll probably have more to say on it later.

Something else we were impressed by was the responses of our farmer partners. A few times, JP directed a question that made me flinch to one of our farmers, for example, “What have you learned from these people?” Expecting painful silence, I was pleasantly surprised when each time the response came back pretty darn close to something one of us actually said. This not only made us feel great during the inspection, but made us all feel better about the training program we are trying to initiate here and gave us more confidence in the abilities of our partners, an invaluable thing.

In the next week or so we will be rushing about, telling the growers the news and making sure that they have implemented the corrections we gave them during the internal inspections. If they have, then they get to start harvesting their coffee as organic, which is something special. There is still no guarantee that the coffee will actually make it to the US as USDA Certified Organic, which depends on us fulfilling the corrections EcoCert gave us, but we’re ready to take that bet.

Kids These Days

About 2 years after finishing college I was at a party in my hometown with a bunch of people I had gone to highschool with. One buddy I got to speak with had been a solid baseball player while we were in school together and got to keep playing ball through college (cue Springsteen any time). For the last two Springs he was putting in some time as an assistant coach for our alma mater and was having a good time with it. As we spoke, the topic got to how the students on the team just didn’t seem to put in the effort he remembered putting in himself back in the day. To commiserate, I told him about the troubles I was having with the three new, high school aged employees my boss had saddled me with at the greenhouse. It took about five minutes of this venting (bitching?) before one of us used the phrase ‘kids these days.’ Mind you, we were about 24 years old ourselves and even now at the ripe age of 28 I don’t think it’s quite right for me to comment on youth culture as though it were something foreign from me. That being said, I did say something about kids these days a little while ago, talking with some friends here.

These guys were all 30-something Cameroonians with children between the ages of 1 and 10. Honestly, I think their gripe session was doing something a little more “uphill both ways in the snow” than “kids these days”, but it still seems relevant. In either case, both sorts of complaint highlight a difference in generations. Often, this is just a perceived difference based on an idealized view of our own youth (me and my friend fit this I’m sure) but other times it is real (the children of these Cameroonian guys do have access to technology and school/learning materials they themselves didn’t).

This got me thinking, is it just a part of the human condition to see a difference between your own generation and those that follow? Or does there need to be actual cultural differences? If the life of your children is nearly identical to your own life do you still vetch about kids these days? Or is it a symptom of the emergence of an actual youth culture?

I imagine that in 17^th century Europe there probably wasn’t too much disagreement between generations amongst the peasant class. There just wouldn’t have been enough media (music, books, theatre) or it wouldn’t have changed quickly enough to divide generations in a philosophical way. I’d guess that the same has been true here in Oku until very recently. You’ll hear people of all ages describe their culture in the same terms. What you don’t hear is anything about youth culture, counter culture, or underground culture (maybe you could find that in Bamenda). Being the product of my own culture (GenY, maybe?) I have to think that this is an unfortunate lack in Cameroon and one that may be filled in a reasonable amount of time if “kids these days” conversations are any indication.