Pics

Merry Christmas to all.

Its been a long time coming but I'm finally putting up a few pictures of whats happening here in Cameroon.

This is Daniel, one of the many farmers that we're working with here, picking ripe red cherries from his field.

Guy, our washing station chief, sorts out bad beans from a table of drying coffee.

Guy again, with a neighborhood kid we call Bobo, who likes to come by after school and see what we're up to. Again, they're going through the drying coffee, hand-picking the bad beans.

This is the hand-depulping machine we're using to remove the beans from the cherries. It sits atop a tree stump, and beside it sits a basket of ripe coffee cherries waiting to be depulped.


We're still harvesting cherries and will be through the month of January so the work continues....

Crawl, Crawl … now Sprint

This is my first trip to the internet in almost a month, and I assure you not by choice.

My last post laid out a plan of action for the coffee project – once assurances of coffee purchase and materials for the washing station came from project partner Schluter Coffee, we’d start buying and processing coffee in early November. It looked great on paper, and I was ready to go. Unfortunately things rarely go as planned.

I’ll get into details very soon, but for now I’ll just say that there was a great deal of uncertainty from the end of October through the first two weeks of November concerning whether or not the materials and purchasing were going to happen. That meant that I had to move very cautiously for those three weeks and maintain balance on an exceedingly thin tightrope.

In the end it all worked out. The station is up and running. We’re buying cherries everyday and processing. It’s exhausting. I’m working pretty much 7 days a week and 9 – 10 hour days are the norm, but it feels great to be doing it. The harvest (and the heavy workload) will go on until about a week before Christmas - about another three weeks.

I’ll have a more detailed description of what’s go on in the next few days and I’ll finally be posting pictures. So check back soon.