In Ethiopia, Coffee Organizer Finds News for Celebration -- and Concern
18 January 2006
Coffee-growing communities enjoy benefits of fair trade premium, but still struggle with basic survival issues.
By Shayna Harris
Negele Gurbitu, ETHIOPIA -- It felt like the first day of third grade.
Trying to not to attract too much attention, I scooted between the rows of long wooden benches, looking for an empty seat. As I searched, the bright eyes of 50 Ethiopian children followed me. It was my first trip to their country, but I was the curiosity of the day. Many of the students, some as young as six years old, had never seen a white person before.
As the Coffee Organizer for Oxfam America, I traveled to Ethiopia this December to visit local coffee cooperatives and learn more about the lives of the coffee producers and their families. It was an incredibly moving experience for me. On the one hand, I saw the real impact of fair trade on the lives of the families that I met. On the other, there were constant reminders of how difficult life is for coffee growing families.
The morning we met the children in their cheery yellow classroom was an uplifting one. In this community, more than 550 students had once crammed into two classrooms. Their parents knew this was no way to learn, so they pooled together some of their profits from fair trade coffee sales and expanded the school. Now there are four new classrooms and a teacher’s room. And more desks and chairs are on the way.
“Before we couldn’t control the class,” said the school director Mudesir Kedit. The new and improved school is “a good environment … and it’s better for the students.”
