Friday, September 21, 2012

I try to keep this light...

But this post is going to be a gripe. (Fair warning to my mother, if you are going to ever skip a post, make it this one)

   This past week I did a good bit of traveling. I don’t love traveling here in Cameroon; it’s part of the territory and necessary for some parts of work and if I want to see other ex-pats. The thing is, it’s dangerous, like really dangerous, and to give a fair and balanced view of what life is like here in Cameroon it is something that should be disclosed at some time.
   I travel by public transportation, very rarely do I find myself in a privately owned car, and when I do it is usually for a short trip. The different options for public transport are buses, motorcycles (as long as the road is unpaved), mini-buses, and cars. Which mode is preferred or available depends on the exact trip you’re taking: Motorcycles are the go to for travel on unpaved roads and short distances and mini-buses are the most common option between cities. Cars have the advantage of filling up quicker than either kind of bus, but are usually even more crammed. In a five passenger car four in the back three up-front is standard and when the driver is especially ‘industrious’ he can usually get one more person in by sharing the driver’s seat (referred to a petit chauffeur). It is amazing how accustomed a person can get to this kind of arrangement, it is what it is.
   The picture in this post is the evidence of the worst incident I’ve been involved in, and it was relatively mild. This happened on the road between Mbouda and Bamenda just after Santa. Had the wheel come off at a few other places (e.g. the switchbacks descending into Bamenda) it would be a different situation. Car accidents are common and people are so crammed into cars that any built-in safety devices are made obsolete. This past month, a friend from Bali was recently in an accident that led to his arm being broken and a woman losing her life.This is the kind of news that is shared widely and tut-tutted at, but that is about the extent of the outrage.
   Life is invaluable. Putting each other’s lives at risk to save a thousand francs on a trip from here to Bamenda is lunacy. That being said, have I ever coughed up the extra cash to pay the driver to only take as many passengers as they have seatbelts? No, I haven’t. But I wish that at one of the dozens of police and gendarme check-points a car will pass through in a day an officer would compel the driver to follow those laws that are definitely on the books here. Instead, any driver simply puts out a little bit of money and passes without any regard for the overloading of their vehicle.
   People at every level gripe about these issues, but they are so institutionalized that no one can imagine a way to change them (is David Simon looking for a new project?). I don’t have exact details, but I heard that the mayor or some official at about that level actually did start strictly imposing the limit on the number of passengers leaving one of the cities here in the North West (Belo, maybe?). The result was a strike by the transport workers. I’m not sure what the resolution was and maybe I should have waited til I had my details straight to even mention it, but I’ll get back to you on it.

P.S. Actually, I do take the First Class service to Yaounde from Bamenda when I can, its 1000 francs more than the other bus and everyone gets their own seat. Funnily, it’s like being on the Chinatown bus between Philly and NYC, but here it feels like being in a Lincoln Towncar.

Saturday, September 15, 2012

Every Link in the Chain

   This week, as we continue in our efforts to get our operation certified as organic we need to leave the farm and head back to Bali for a few days. It can be daunting how many steps there are to certify. To be certified as Organic, a product needs to remain under controlled and certified conditions all the way along the product chain. For our case this means from the farmer to the bags of coffee sold to consumers by Mocha Joes. There are lots of steps in-between. Just listing them can be difficult, which we found out when Philip, Gilbert, and I sat down to complete a profile of our processing and exporting. When we started our estimate of how many points of control we needed was pretty low, but by the end we had a much longer list.
Farm to you: our coffee's trip from Oku to the US
   What adds to the frustration is that some of these points are under our direct control (for example, sweeping the mill between batches of coffee) while others are being handled by a company we either hire or contract to do the work (this would include most of the steps involved in shipping). In the cases where the control points are our direct responsibility, we deal with them by drafting internal documents and memorandum that lay out our procedures. To again use sweeping the mill between batches of coffee as an example, when our inspectors come they will want to see that we have a section included in our handbook describing exactly how the machines and other work surfaces are to be cleaned. They will also want to see proof that we are practically following those guidelines: in this case, maybe a sign posted just where coffee is loaded into the hulling machine that says something to the effect of “STOP!!! Is this a new batch of ORGANIC coffee? Have we cleaned to machines yet?”
   When we are dealing with steps not under our direct control, our auditors are still going to want to check on the situation. If we are lucky, some of these company’s may have experience dealing with organic products (I’m a little bit hopeful that the shipper we contract will fall into this category) and they will be happy to help us with our efforts. On the other hand, I can imagine that some companies that work as contract warehouses or packers won’t be thrilled at the idea of signing an additional contract with one of their clients and having outsiders poking around their premises.
   So while the farm is the bedrock of the whole process, the place where our coffee beans spend the best years (months) of their lives and will be nostalgic for later, it is only one part (the first part) of a long chain that we need to control in order to assure our consumers that the coffee they are drinking is 100% organic.

Monday, September 3, 2012

Advances Part II: Keeping it on the DL

   Over the last three days we distributed just about all the money we are going to be giving as advances for coffee this year. As I wrote last week, we put most of our resources into farmers who are part of our organic growing program. We figured that the best way to get this done was to convene meetings in each of the villages/quarters we are working in. Ostensibly, the agenda of the meetings was to plan for the training sessions we will have in the next several months (which in itself is an important activity that I’m happy we accomplished), but we also used the opportunity to pull some people aside and make these transactions. This kept us from either having to travel all over Oku tracking people down or advertising broadly that we were going to be handing out cash this week.
   One of our goals was to keep this activity as quiet as possible. About 90% of farmers are interested in getting an advance on their coffee at this time of year, so if it became common knowledge that we were in the process of giving out cash we would never hear the end of the demands. As you may imagine, pulling individuals aside in a crowded meeting itself provides some complications but Cassman, Philip and myself pulled it off pretty well. We didn’t make any actual plan, but we were able to get by with one or two people providing some kind of distraction before or after the meeting while the other(s) got to work somewhere a little more private. Of 23 individuals in Oku we delivered an advance to 19 along with two people who stumbled upon our ‘plot’ who we decided we were safe giving a small amount to. That leaves four that I’ll need to track down over the next week or so in order to finish up.
   There was one individual who actually turned down an advance on his coffee. I didn’t speak to him about it, but Philip tells me that he has bad feelings towards holding any kind of debt, fearing that if some misfortune were to befall him he would leave his wife or children in an uncomfortable position. Apparently he also manages his money well enough to be able to pay for school fees from his own pocket, something I really admire. This guy represents an exception to the rule.
   The more common situation is for someone to tell you about how they are suffering and that an advance would help to solve their problem. On a very personal note, this irks the heck out of me. I understand and respect the position of any business person who tries to get themselves the best deal they can, and most people view an advance payment as a pretty good deal (and from the way we handle ours, I’d say they are right), but I occasionally need to take a deep breath to keep from snapping something along the lines of, ‘How is that our problem?!?!’ In fairness to me, I never really get that close to snapping, but I am really often reminded of a story a former boss of mine (Steve) told me: A man goes into his boss’ office, sits down, and tells the boss that he needs to give him a raise. The boss asks why he needs to and the man tells him that he just found out his wife is pregnant. The boss glares at the man and yells, ‘Are you accusing me of sleeping with your wife?!?!’ I think I’ll try that story out with a friend of two and see how it goes over.