Coffee

Coffee, like many exported agricultural products, has all kinds of political, economic, and environmental implications. Concern for the small scale farmer has resulted in a variety of marketing schemes such as fair trade, which help farmers improve their income, and help coffee drinkers have a positive social and ecological impact. Over the years I have come into contact with small scale coffee farmers all over the world, and have always been interested in finding better ways to support them. So here it is, a very modest plan to help a handful of farmers get quality coffee directly into your cup. For the time being, I will be getting coffee from one farmer only, Bellington and his wife Mary, pictured below. Bellington's farm is 1 acre on the slopes of Kilimanjaro, Tanzania, an area known for high quality coffee. Bellington uses no chemicals, and cultivates shade-grown arabica coffee. This means his farm is a mixture of crops and trees, much more ecologically sustainable than the large scale sun-grown commercial farms found in other parts of the world.

I will be getting a shipment of coffee from Bellington in early December. If you are interested please contact me and I will set some aside for you. Please let me know what kind of roast you want, and whether you want whole beans or ground. I recommend whole beans, as the quality of ground coffee detiorates fairly quickly. I should also warn you that I will be charging premium coffee prices. More on this soon. For now, I do not know about export regulations to the US, so Canadians only, sorry. To place your order please go to http://www.forestrivercoffee.com/ordering.html

Bellington and Mary on their 1 acre mixed coffee farm in Tanzania

I really think everyone should visit Tanzania. But then I think that about just about everywhere. So maybe the moral is that you should just go somewhere. Something amazing is sure to be there. My apologies for the lack of posts lately, and for the uninspired nature of this post. I'm hoping in the next couple of evenings, while spare time and good internet connection coincide, to put something down on paper. Here is the view of the garden in late evening light from where I send this message to you.

Translation Requested

I am looking for someone who is willing to translate Chinese to English. At least this page. There is an entire 48 page manual which needs translating, but who has that kind of time? If someone is interested, I can guess at the critical pages and send them to you. 

This is the operating manual for the microhydro unit that I mentioned in a previous blog entry. It clearly has application for a lot of the places that I visit.

This is my last entry in this 40 days of blogging. I didn't quite get an entry in every day, but it is a testament to the availability of internet (truly worldwide) that I missed as few days as I did. I wish I had something profound to share with you , something inspiring, but in lieu of that I have posted this song. Please don't be put off by the artist, or the style of music.

Happy Easter.

The thing that seems to happen is that whereever I happen to be is the reality, and those other places I've been just recently? They seem to be a very far. distant memory. In fact was I really in Korea earlier this week? I think the brain just naturally filters out stuff. It's like what they say about people with photographic memories. In some cases their brains can't distinguish between important and unimportant information and it impedes their decision making ability. They have to work at trying to block out or forget some information just to be functional.  Still, in this case, I have to do analysis and report on those far away places, which means I have to dive back in and immerse myself in that memory again. Except Korea, that was just a tourist stop. One of the few times ever that I've allowed myself, even briefly, to be 100% tourist. 

Random photo of some random Korean tourist attraction. I didn't even write down the name of it, or find out how many hectares of land it is on, or what kind of crops they grow around there. Take that serious part of my brain!

Last night I had a chance to meet a group of people from a local church who are working with a community of Haitians living in the Dominican Republic. I really admire the fact that first of all they are concerned about some folks living in some really difficult circumstances, and second that they are thinking about and wrestling with the best way to reach out to people in need. It was a chance for me to learn and also to be encouraged.  So often, you see kind of the opposite, that is, general indifference, or people trying to help without thinking it through and doing more harm than good. If you've taken first aid training you know about this concept; people trying to help an accident victim and causing even greater injury. 

For those of you who are thinking it is a strange coincidence that I would show up in S. Korea one day after the N. Koreans launched their missile, so am I. I didn't even know it had happened until I got their and our tour guide was talking about it. She claims that S. Koreans are not so concerned, and that the Japanese are more worried. I myself was so taken by the beautiful spring weather and the impressive airport, that something so menacing seemed far away and of little importance.

I made it. Minus one bag of course. I am beginning to wonder if  there is something about that particular bag which makes it easy to lose, since my record for lost baggage is well over 50%. This particular time it happened to be Air Canada, but the previous time, in March was SwissAir.

I arrived last night and slept til about 8 am this morning. When I awoke, I thought, "Great, I'll get up, have some breakfast, maybe take a walk, and start to get back into this time zone...". About 10 hours later I woke up again, realizing I had missed my opportunity. Well, perhaps tomorrow.