Coffee with Clementine!

Where does your coffee come from?

 Well, if it says it is from Uganda, you may be drinking some of Clementine's coffee!  She rents a piece of land which has abandoned coffee trees.  She has worked on them, and they yielded a good crop this year.  I had some time, and wanted to spend more time with Clementine (said Clementina) because she is one of my best friends.  So we worked together on coffee!

(Note:  My camera does not take quality photos.  If anyone would like to donate the money to get a new camera when I am in Ireland, I would really appreciate it!  I worked hard to make these photos look even half way decent!)

The first part of the adventure was to put out the already picked coffee for drying.  The sky was overcast, but thankfully it did not rain.  Coffee has to be sun dried before sold to the processor. 

Clem's neighbor drying his coffee (he has a good tarp)

Right:  Un-dried  Left:  Dried

Un-dried beans are beautiful!

Clem spreading her coffee (I helped right after the photo)

Coffee drying in the compound near the mango tree

 After we spread the coffee to dry, Clem took me to her new land across the street and told me all about what she hopes to do with it. Her mom called as we walked and I got to hear her local language for the first time, it's incredibly different from the others in Uganda!

Then we went out to the coffee farm, and started picking!  It's not hard, and I had a great teacher. 

To the field!  Beans on the tree

Green beans... we picked the rip ones

 To pick the coffee we put a cut up tarp like bag under where we were picking.  We ran our hands down the branch and carefully pull the plump, rip beans off the branch, gathering them in the tarp below. 

(One of my favorite photos)

Picking and talking in the sun

An abundant harvest!

 We had a near miss with Safari Ants (see the former post to hear about how terrible those creatures are).  I was grateful the Clem saw them before we got covered!

Once we had gotten the tarp pretty full, we transferred the beans to a bucket, then into a sack.  We got almost half a sack in the time we were out!  That is close to 30 dollars worth of coffee!  Many hands make light work. 

our sack of beans!

 I left a few minutes before Clemintine because I had to get ready for our meetings, which started in the afternoon.  I carried our prized sack of coffee, the holes in the sack covered over with coffee leaves, back to her compound. 

A Beautiful woman!

We had a great time harvesting and laughing together!!  Thanks Clemintine!!!

A day in this life...

So much happens so quickly here, it's very hard to keep up with blogging everything.  I am sorry about this!

I will start a few weeks back and try to catch up over the next week to where we are now. 

The week of Dec 5th to Dec 12th was CORNERSTONE WEEK!!   Why do I say this?  I did an enormous amount with the organization I volunteer for.  I know this sounds funny, but I technically only work from their offices 3 days a week, as my job is the Outreach Coordinator...so I am often outreaching.  :) 

It was a fantastic week of getting to know the family better.  At Cornerstone Development we call ourselves a family of friends, which indeed we are.

But before I get into everything that happened with the Cornerstone crew, I should tell you about my other adventures.

We had a meeting for head teachers for Cornerstone schools at Emmaus Center. To be efficient, I decided to travel out to Emmaus a day early, and have some meetings.  I was suppose to travel with Javis, my workmate, but he got caught up by other work.

I left early, and got a taxi to Matugga, I had never stopped there.  I managed to find my way to where I was going, thankfully the place was on the main road.  After wandering around a construction site for a while, I found my way up a narrow stair case build into a large wall.  I felt like I was going to fall off of it as I waited for the door in the wall to open. 

Eventually it was opened and I was instructed where to wait.  I was there to meet the local parish priest, a friar from Poland.  He pulled up in a bit of a hurry, as they were moving into the house that day!  He made some time for me, and I explained that we would like him to be involved at the Cornerstone girl's school.  He was very receptive and kind.  I think we'll be friends.

By 10 am I was done with that meeting!  Miracles do happen... and in an overloaded taxi out to Emmaus.  The taxi almost missed my stop, and found me shouting for it to stop.  Sigh. 

As soon as I had reached, I got a phone call from Gabriel who I had planned to meet with in the afternoon.  He said that Peter, the community leader, couldn't meet in the afternoon, and could we meet now?  I literally walked up to him as we talked on the phone and he burst out laughing.

I was ready to go right then and meet with them... but that's not the way in Africa.  Someone took off with my backpack (not stolen, but helping me to put it somewhere so I don't have to carry) and Clara hustled me to the dinning area for a "cup of tea", where she instructed the girl serving to give me baby bananas and more ground nuts than I could eat in a year.

After sufficently eating my food and drinking my (wonderful) milk tea, I was allowed to go meet with Gabriel and Peter.  This was an "outreach" meeting... We're hoping to do the 10 principles of Leadership at Emmaus this coming year, so it was planning for that.  Also, we are trying to straighten the connection between Emmaus and Cornerstone... so far so good.

Once the meeting was over, I had the rest of the day visiting, reading and resting.  I was really tired.  I spent most of the afternoon hours with Clementine (said Clementina), I love that lady!  I ordered some crafts from her to take to Ireland with me.

Life is always an adventure here... this was a miraculously productive day, and it felt good to actually accomplish something in relation to others! 

Next stop... coffee.  :)

some beautiful sky photos... due to the lack of photos in this post!

Final Masaka Update

Here are the last pictures and notes from Masaka.  It was a wonderful course, and a lot of people experience transformation in their lives! :)

Affirmation Envelopes

 

 

 As a team building activity, everyone wrote each other encouraging notes throughout the week.  At the end of the course we all got our envelopes and were able to read what people had written us.

Staff (and baby Jessica) enjoying the skits

Learning about commitment through an activity by Carol

My only group photo before my camera died!

 The course focused on team work and personal life management.  Our participants learned a lot of material, which they are now challenged to implement in their daily lives.  I'll be continuing to work with this group to make sure they are sticking to what they committed to!

Henry

Janeipher

Joseph, Noelle and baby Michael

Oh Baby!  it was great fun having 2 six month old babies with us!

Often at night we did not have power

Best Photos!  Pauline and Gloria

Patrick is a great teacher, and a fantastic father! 

Listening and Learning...

Overall, this course was a fantastic experience.  The participants really engaged the material, and grew a lot even in just a few days!   I look forward to working with them all more this year.