For the last several weeks I have
been living in Bali which is where the mill is located. Bali is
situated about 20 km west of Bamenda and is connected by a paved road
making the trip to and from quick and painless. Bali is a decent
sized village, probably less than 10,000 people but the paved road
makes it a pretty bustling place. Also, there are several small
colleges and universities in town which keeps the age demographic
much more evenly distributed than in my former village (where there
were essentially no persons between the ages of 20 and 35). The Fon
of Bali is a premiere Fon and he maintains a very impressive palace
and works hard to keep the culture of the region active making Bali a
very popular stop for tourists to the region.
Bali is also home to the Bali Area
Coffee Cooperative, owners of the mill that Mocha Joe's is currently
using to hull and grade our coffee here in Cameroon. The mill is a
large warehouse type building housing an industrial sized hulling and
grading machine. It isn't the first hulling/grading machine to be
installed in the building, but it is a few decades old. The guys who
work with the machine are well used to some of its idiosyncrasies and
seem to do just fine with it. Outside there are several platforms for
drying and covered areas where sorters can work out of the sun and/or
rain. Sorters are the people, mostly ladies, who take over the
process of selecting the highest quality coffee beans after the
machine has performed the initial cleaning and grading. I've tried my
own hand at selecting, spending a couple of hours each day picking
out black, damaged, over fermented, or insect chewed beans. To put it
simply, I'm really slow when it comes to sorting. Sorters are paid
per sac (60-kg) after Philip has confirmed that the work has been
well done. Grades (A, B, C, D, or T for Arabica coffee) have
different standards for what passes such that by the time the highest
grade coffees are ready for export they are a very pretty batch of
uniform little beans just asking to be roasted. The lower grades, on
the other hand, (and I'm not quite sure who will end up drinking
these) have a distinctly less pristine character.
A well experienced person (that is
to say, not me) can work through one or two sacs in a day (I would
want to set aside about a week) depending on the grade. My impression
is that people are happy to have the opportunity to work at sorting
as they can take home more cash then they would from a days labor in
the farm, the hours are flexible, and the atmosphere among the
sorters is pleasantly communal with children being more than welcome
and a small meal shared each day.
As the season for selecting and
cleaning wears to an end, I am anxious to travel towards Oku to meet
our farmer partners whom I will be working with on the organic
certification project.
