Hilary Beans

Sunday, April 30, 2006

Quarterly Report 3

Hi all,
I know it has been a long time. I have some backlogged blogs I will be putting up here in the next few days, about four of them on my awesome experience of the last month in Rwanda, where I was learning cupping, doing interviews, trying to speak French, talking to people about coffee, experienceing genocide commemoration week, and eating tons of bananas and french fries (who knew fries were such a staple food the world over?). Anyway, thank you all for continuing to read even when I am bad about updates. Here is my third quartely report. Hard to believe we are down to the last few months...


Africa. It is a continent that in my younger days I didn’t expect to visit. Full of mystery. Dark and different, unknown. In Tanzania, I stepped out of the Arusha Airport unsure of what I was stepping into; excited, but nervous. How would I get by in countries where English (or Spanish) were not so widely spoken? How would this continent be different than where I had spent the last few months, in somewhere more familiar? Starting this section of the project on a new continent, I was faced with many more of these questions than when I hopped on an airplane headed for Nicaragua. They needled my confidence as much as the questions I had about my project coming in.
But the magic of the Watson is that we are each given the opportunity to claim parts of the world that before seemed unimaginable. My self-confidence has been boosted greatly these last few months, as I have found that I can make my way in new countries on an unfamiliar continent in countries that seemed daunting to begin with. I have learned that I can communicate in places where my knowledge of local languages is exceedingly limited. I have spent hours laughing, chatting and communicating with people when our shared vocabulary consists of only a dozen words.
My experience working with organizations in Africa has helped mature my understanding of how community development happens. I am passionate about ensuring that people have opportunities and access to resources. This year has been about investigating models that facilitate development in that way. However, I came into the year imagining that cooperatives needed to be philanthropic and solely development focused. In Nicaragua I was disturbed by the focus of CECOCAFEN on business. How could producers relate to this? How did this best serve members? Why were they so profit oriented? Shouldn’t they put more effort into their education programs and other development initiatives rather then being so business driven?
During these three months, I have reevaluated this preconception and come to understand that in order to be successful, cooperatives must be business oriented. I have realized that having some focus on efficiency is not a negative trait, nor does it imply that the group is not working to aid and empower members. Rather, it illustrates a commitment to running successful programs. Many of the cooperatives that I have encountered in these two countries are working to build infrastructure that is integral to increasing farmer incomes. I have come to understand that this is a clear precursory step to implementing education or other kinds of empowerment programs. In addition, seeing how people are incorporated and empowered through the development of successful small businesses has shown me one very successful way to ensure producer empowerment and ownership of projects. By developing structures that increase income while working to develop cooperative spirit and community consciousness, people and communities are far more empowered than by aid models implemented in so many places. I have seen how strategies for gender equality and reducing child labor can be worked into business models. This focus is changing the way many cooperatives operate.
In Tanzania the history of giant, unresponsive, and mismanaged cooperatives is one of the major challenges to developing successful producer organizations today. Farmers are not anxious to jump into a ‘cooperative’ when their previous experience included handing over their products and never receiving payment. It was very interesting to work with both NGOs and parts of the Tanzanian government, USAID, and other organizations to see how producers are negotiating this history in attempts to create new farmer organizations. New Farmer Business Groups seem to be replacing historical cooperatives, with similar missions but more of a focus on business development in hopes of avoiding some of the pitfalls of past cooperatives.
In Rwanda, current cooperatives are fighting hard to dispel a historical conception of cooperatives as government-run farmer welfare programs. They are working to change mindsets to cooperatives as business, increase democratic participation and ownership of organizations. In the southern region of Rwanda, where I spent my time, this approach has helped farmers to double and in some cases triple farmer incomes in the last five years, creating new opportunities for members as well as providing a model for cooperative development around the world.
Also during this time, I attended my first conference with the international coffee community. In February, I spent four days at the East African Fine Coffee Association Conference In Arusha, Tanzania. It was held at a multi-million dollar resort, and present were those from the Founder of Starbucks to new independent roasters to producers from all over Eastern Africa. It was fascinating to see and imagine how all of these people are related as links in the chain of a $90 billion per year business.
Meeting exporters, importers, roasters, and others improved my understanding of the international coffee industry as well as the position of small-scale farmers within that industry. I learned more about certification, and the challenges facing those at the consumer end of the coffee industry. I was also able to hear their advice to producers, which was very enlightening, providing a virtual roadmap for growing quality for specialty markets. It is based on quality, not on labels. Consumers will not repeatedly purchase low quality products simply because they are marked with a Fair Trade or Rainbow Alliance label. Dependence upon consumer’s social conscience does not empower consumers or producers. Putting a focus on improving quality to empower producers to cultivate products that can sustainably increase their incomes allows independent development and empowerment. They avoid becoming dependent upon the philanthropy of consumers that puts producers at the will of fluctuating disposable incomes.
Since arriving in Africa, I have also been able to see how much I have learned. My ability to make comparisons has expanded. I have much more knowledge about the kinds of questions to ask to get the information that I want. I am able to question and challenge people and models that I see. I can determine which programs present in one place would be helpful in another and have been able to share that information. This exchange is the crux of the Watson Fellowship. It also helps me to understand how I want to be involved with development work in the future. It is fascinating and inspiring for me to see models that are working. I am thinking of applying for a Fulbright in the future to work on implementing some quality control programs at communities I have visited this year. It is awesome to imagine how my work from this year may shape my future, and how the knowledge that I have gained will be useful in the future to more than myself. Also, I have decided to return to Guatemala after visiting Ethiopia in June to talk to a few of the people I didn’t know to talk to when I was first there.
On life experience notes, I have had many other adventures during these months. Getting to talk to Amelia has been amazing, to engage about each other’s projects as well as about our experience as Watson fellows in general. It has helped me to know how our experiences are similar and different, and which ones are related to being a Watson Fellow. We traveled together to see Rwanda’s mountain gorillas, which was awesome! (If any of you get the chance to come to Rwanda, I recommend it as highly as possible!) I also trained during my time in Rwanda as a coffee cupper, learning to identify and score coffee quality, a necessary skill if I want to work in this area in the future. By the end of my month, I was impressed that my scoring of the coffee more or less matched that of the girls who work each day at the coffee lab. Finally, this process, which has seemed mysterious for much of the year, is coming clearer! Perhaps I will be able to do a cupping at the conference in August. Hard to believe how quickly that will be coming up…

Saturday, April 08, 2006

Memorial Day

People smile. They walk to the grocery store. They stop and talk on the street. University students study for exams. They meet with friends. They make their meals. They continue their lives.
Only these days, some of these daily activities are visibly interrupted to remember events that shook this country to its roots. The cotidial chores stop, and people take the time to remember.
This is Genocide Memorial Week in Rwanda, a time to honor and remember the four months twelve years ago that left more than a million people in mass graves, murdered in their homes, in schools, churches, on the street. It is traumatic. It is difficult. It is unbelievable. I don’t know how to write about it, and I have only been here two weeks. I have no notion of the actual experience. The sinking pit of knots in my stomach can be nothing compared to the anguish experienced both individually and collectively by the people with whom I am sharing these streets day to day.
The university students with whom I have spent the last days are members of the genocide survivor’s organization. Of the university’s 6,000 students, more than 800 belong to the organization. This week they are holding testimonials, movies about the genocide here and in other nations, making vigils in cemeteries, and aiming to support each other. For many, this is their family. They are orphans, siblingless, having lost in many cases their entire families twelve years ago.
Thursday night I attended a ceremony at the university, where a theatrical interpretation of the genocide was made. It followed a family from five years prior to the genocide, when boys in school were split up according to their ethnicity. It follows the family to the church five years later, where seeking refuge, they found death. It followed the son, who had fled the country, to the church, where he arrives as a rebel fighter, and finds his two parents dead.
Yesterday, we went to the national memorial service and heard the president speak. He stressed, as did others, the importance of memory. Of never forgetting. Rwanda has an entire genre of music dedicated to the genocide. All stress remembrance, which is what this week is about. But what does it mean? I walked through a memorial, a long hallway with a walkway on either side. In the center was a slightly raised block, twenty feet wide and four hundred feet long. Underneath reside the bodies of some 5,000 people, less than a one tenth of the people who were killed only in that region. Halfway through was a chest. Underneath the glass were the first human bones I have seen in person, 12 skulls and a pile of neatly laid femur bones. As the woman ahead of us passed it, she cried out and fell hysterically to the floor. She was half carried, half dragged out as she wailed out her grief and memory. Another woman behind us, mute, kept signaling to her back, where Rwandan women carry their babies. She then pointed to the grave, explaining through gestures that two of her children were buried there.
I don’t know how to deal with this event. It is so large as to be unimaginable. I can imagine the twelve skulls that I saw. But how do you imagine a million bodies, a million bones, the billions of screams, of minutes of fear, of anguish, of disbelief, of pain, that make an event like this one? The confusion engulfs not only visitors like me, but Rwandans, who lost their country, their families, and their lives. They played dead among the corpses of their loved ones to avoid death. They came away maimed and traumatized. They grew up fatherless or motherless or both. They survived to be traumatized, to attempt to rebuild a nation with a history that cannot be understood, but a pain so real it is tangible.
I want to cry, to ask, how is it possible to continue under this burden, this blackness of sorrow, this emptiness? But is it for me to ask? They do continue, no doubt they cry, they mourn, they remember. They are braver than I can ever imagine being, a whole nation of people of subtle strength, who are attempting to move forward together. They are 25 year-old orphans holding each other as they go to sleep on the bus after staying awake all night together, to remember those they lost. They are singing out their pain, singing out their memory, in an attempt, if not to understand, simply to make known what happened. They are recognizing.
And I am angry. How could we have done nothing? Allowed children and parents, fellow human beings to be slaughtered? What is the evil? The evil that prompts such acts, and that that allows them to continue as we stand by watching? It is both.
To this day in Rwanda, bodies are still being uncovered. The figure of 800,000 cannot be accurate, far more than 1,000,000 Rwandans were lost during the darkest time in their recent history. As I walk these streets, make friends, meet people, I wonder how they go on. I have asked. They say that you don’t always know how you continue, but you do. One way or another, you do.
I find it hard to express both my amazement and my admiration for Rwandans. They are braver than I can imagine being in the face of their experience. This week, they pack schools and community centers to watch documentaries, talk, ask questions, to remember. Their genocide and their loss is nothing they are trying to hide. These days they ache to remember, to ensure that it cannot happen again by instilling it in the national consciousness. Though I do not imagine that it needs to be reinstilled, this national time of mourning seems to be serving the purpose of nation building through mutual support. In the face of it, I feel awed, impressed and inspired. The wells of strength in the human spirit are immeasurable.

Tuesday, April 04, 2006

Stories

Rwanda. Like any country, countless stories, lives and histories continue here on a daily basis. However, in much of the western world, we know only one of Rwanda’s stories. Rwanda seems inextricably linked to another word: genocide. Vague and concrete images of violence crowd the mind, statistics. 800,000 people killed in 100 days. An eighth of the population. In the United States, this percentage would be equivalent to 40 million people. One of the worst tragedies of our time. The biggest humanitarian failure of the 20th century. For many of us, it is the only story we know.
But in this small country, there are so many other stories. It is the land of mountain gorillas and a thousand hills, one of the most densely populated countries in the world. The size of Massachusetts with a population of 8.5 million. As I ride the minibus around these hills, everything is drenched in green. It seems each inch is under cultivation, a veritable checkerboard of lush grasses, maize stalks, cassava roots, coffee trees. Small streams separate crops, or different kinds of tall grasses or trees, creating lace like borders around the productive squares. In the countryside, small mud houses are intermittently dispersed among these, often on precariously steep hillsides.
On the streets of Butare, the university city where I am living, one hears both Kinyarwanda, the national language, and French. Muraho, bonjour. This, like baguettes, is part of the legacy left by the Belgians, who were Rwanda’s colonial guardians from the late 19th century until the early ‘60s. I wish that I spoke more French.
The main street through town is two lanes, lined by three grocery stores, the two ‘luxury hotels’ (still only costing $40 per night), a gas station, and countless young moto-taxi drivers. Women walk by with babies strapped to their backs and baskets of fruit balanced on their heads. Bicycles are common. People are everywhere. It feels slow moving despite being the nations second largest city and its intellectual hub.
I have been here a week and am starting to uncover some of Rwanda’s current stories. The one that I am working on most directly is the story of Rwanda’s run-away success in the specialty coffee industry. In the last five years, the income of some of Rwanda’s poorest farmers has doubled or tripled as farmers have joined new organizations and switched their focus from ‘more is better’ to ‘better is better.’ The farmers and workers and children I have met seem happy and hardworking, they are moving forward, progressing. I am hoping to uncover some of their secrets, their goals, their desires. I want to know more of Rwanda’s different stories.