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!!!