I am back from my second visit to the field on behalf of the Farmers Union of Malawi (FUM). I visited Mzuzu with the country director for World University Services Canada (WUSC), the organization that is the coordinator of our volunteering here. WUSC is working with FUM to link a Canadian Fair Trade coffee company with the Mzuzu Coffee Planters Union (MCPU). We arrived on Thursday afternoon in Mzuzu which is a very beautiful area of Malawi. It is in the north of the country and is an area of rolling highlands that has the perfect conditions for growing good quality coffee. About 10 years ago the town of Mzuzu got its first traffic light which for reasons I have never been able to discover are called “robots” in Malawi. It was really confusing at first when people were giving us directions telling us to go past the robot and then turn left at the second robot. Adding to the confusion Malawians when speaking English find the letter R and the letter L indistinguishable so often they call Regan Legan and they call the “robots” lobots. When the “robots” were first installed almost the whole town showed up to watch them for hours as no one could believe that cars would actually stop and go just for lights that changed colour. The television news cameras came to see the installation as well.
Our meeting wasn’t until Friday morning so on Thursday afternoon I visited the processing plant where they prepare the coffee beans for sale. It was a very tidy, efficient operation that has been funded by the European Union and is a real success story for smallholder farmers in Malawi.
On Friday morning we met with the management of Mzuzu Coffee and the president / chairman of the Mzuzu Coffee Planters Union which represents the five cooperatives that produce the coffee beans. I presented my concept paper on a history of fair trade, its objectives and it possible benefits for MCPU. The meeting went well especially because Mzuzu Coffee has already started down the road to exploring Fair Trade so it wasn’t an issue of pushing something on them but rather we will be working in partnership with them to help them get through the certification. For dinner in Mzuzu we met the only other male WUSC volunteer. Out of approximately 25 WUSC volunteers in Malawi there are only two males. From everyone who has experience in international work they tell me that that kind of ratio is normal, for some reason there are not as many men at least in the volunteer sector.
