Sober at the ginnery

Some last-day-photos of Coo-Rom ginnery…

The construction area for the new bale-press & generator, with its precarious wooden scaffolding…

Deserted ginning hall, which will look so different next season with new ginning machines & a conveyor belt to carry the cotton lint (assuming all goes to plan…which it never does)…

Graffiti (…of who?) revealed when the final organic cotton bales where emptied from the store…

And more ‘graffiti’ left at the end of the season on the blackboard we put up to record bales produced each shift…

And the now empty desk, where I’ve sat for a year with (a very young) President Museveni looking down on my work…

And then all of a sudden, it is time to leave.  

After nine and a half months calling Gulu my home, I’m packing my bags and saying my goodbyes.  

Late yesterday afternoon at the ginnery, Bruce and Charles arranged a surprise ‘party’.  The team crowded into the familiar office with its cracked concrete floor & peeling-paint walls.  Jennifer made tea, and Paul presented me with not one, but two huge cakes.  The ‘one for eating now’ was covered in rock-hard yellow frosting and a small army of ants that ran away from my knife.  It was delicious.  

Charles announced the arrival of a present: “Something for when you and Max are relaxing in Kampala, with the kittens & some Nile Specials”.  Emadong appeared behind him carrying two low wooden deckchairs, superbly comfy, strong enough that they’ll last for years, and Made in Gulu.

Bruce gave a very kind brief thank you speech, as did Charles, who as ever was so sincere and kind but still hilarious, that I had to will small tears not to fall.  I tried, and undoubtedly failed, to tell them all just how incredibly grateful I have been to work with such a wonderful, welcoming, friendly group of people.

And because I haven’t written for ages, a second post of the day, this time with my latest favourite brands that use organic (and some Fairtrade) cotton:

Ethletic - Complete Converse copy-cats, but without the scandal.  They even have hi-tops!  I have the white ones, which aren’t so white now they’ve been in Gulu for nearly a year.

http://www.thefaircorp.com/category/low-top-trainers 

Electric Tees - Super-soft-organic cotton bodies/t-shirts/vests with really fun graphic prints on them, including giant wolves & tigers (why not?).  I also won one in a competition last week which makes me love them even more.

http://www.electrictees.co.uk/

FAIR+true - 100% organic cotton, with loads of awesome loud African-style and Aztec-style prints.  Nice sandals too.

http://www.fairandtrue.co.uk/ 

For a scheme that aims to empower smallholder farmers, some parts of Fairtrade are surprisingly paternalistic.  To pass the Fairtrade inspection, farmers must slog through creating and operating multiple layers of formalized governance structures.  

At the Acholi Joint Farmer’s Association’s Annual General Meeting (7 capitalized words, to show how formal it was!), the farmers were reminded of the importance of filing, budgeting, accounting, planning, following their constitution and so on.  There must be a Chairman, and that Chairman must be in charge.

I’ve written before on here about how I don’t think all this structure is the farmers’ top priority.  Their questions are always about the cotton price, and how to get better yields.  And I don’t think its a priority for the buyers of Fairtrade products either.  I don’t buy Fairtrade coffee because there’s a Chairman somewhere who always gives 7 days written notice before a meeting; I buy it largely because the farmers get a good price.  

All the admin is costly for the farmers too.  The Chairman can’t invite members to an AGM by a simple phone call - he has to write a letter, copy it, and get it sent via bus/ motorbike/ on foot to each of the 23 delegates’ homes.  Friday’s AGM was centered on the exciting topic of what to spend the Fairtrade Premium on as a group, but it dampens the excitement a bit to have to budget so much for administering the group in the first place.  

It’s also very prescriptive.  Who says having a Control Committee is necessary to run an organisation?  Of course the structures are designed to provide accountability for all members, but my guess is the Fairtrade governance structure is not the one farmers would naturally choose, if they had the choice.

But, having said all of that, I finally saw the impact of some of these things at the meeting on Friday.  

For the first time, the Chairman led the meeting, instead of one of my ginnery colleagues. The Treasurer put forward a summary of the cotton and sesame product last season, and the Secretary shared progress since the last minutes.  A fierce debate ensued about the greatest challenges for next year, and how to solve them, which the Chairman handled with grace, giving each delegate their time to speak and probing enough to get to some proposed solutions.  And eventually they adjourned, deciding to have a second meeting in a few weeks after taking time to discuss options with their neighbours, and pin down the costs and payoffs.  They decided to hire their own venue, and pay for it themselves.

Throughout my time here in Gulu it’s always been obvious that the combination of IDP camps, the collapse of any economy, & widespread handouts during the war has had a big influence on local motivation & expectations from outsiders.  So it was exciting to see the ginnery made redundant in the meeting, and the farmers start to take control to solve their problems for themselves.  

Field work is such a rollercoaster:  disheartening, exciting, frustrating, inspiring.

On Wednesday…

…We saw the worryingly low figures for cotton seed sales, confronting us with the low morale that the huge fluctuation in cotton prices in the last two seasons has caused

…We heard about local politicians who have told farmers to ‘Wait ,don’t plant cotton yet!’, while they supposedly negotiate with the government for free seeds…except we know the seeds will not be made free, and every day the farmers waits means lower yields of their crops

…We checked and corrected the kgs on the receipts farmers handed us to claim their organic top-up fee, removing extra 0’s at the end and extra 1’s added in front, sorting through the blatant forgeries tried by everyone, even the Field Officers who are supposed to be role models

…We paid the organic top-up fee to farmers who clutched sachets of cheap gin in their hands, smiling at me through blood-shot eyes, even though it was barely midday 

And I came home tired, dusty, and fed up, because the deceit and false information and drunken despair makes me feel like giving up

Then Thursday…

…We collected over 500 contracts from farmers who have planted cotton, sesame and chillis, in Atiak, which is so remote & close to South Sudan, but also amazingly fertile, and these farmers have planted early so they’ll get great yields

…We met Oken Peter, a young guy who last year got 1100kg/acre, the second-highest yield of all our farmers, but this year he’s determined to get the highest, and with the oxen we’ve lent him he’s cleared another 2 acres for cotton

…We took our oxen suppliers to meet four farmers who were struggling to plough their newly loaned bulls, and the farmers listened with such attentive focus to the training, and the suppliers agreed without questions to quickly replace the lazy ones

And I came home tired, dusty, and a lot more accepting, because progress is slow and not linear, but its definitely happening.

…

Meet Onono Samuel, 26 years old, and Manager of the ginnery’s newest business - the pine forests.   He’s on the left, showing Charles where the firebreak will stop at the edge of the pines.

Three years ago, on the first day the ginnery opened in Gulu, Onono arrived at the gate clutching his diploma in Computer Science from Gulu University, and asked for a job.  The ginnery compound at the time was overgrown with thick, head-height grass, and Charles put the diploma to one side and asked Onono if he knew how to slash grass.  He replied with a yes, and for nearly a month he sweated and slashed until the compound was cleared.  

Onono’s commitment in those three weeks impressed Charles so much that he was given a fairly punchy promotion, from slasher to grader.  Graders stand with their clipboards as the cotton is off-loaded from trucks, not so much checking the cotton quality as checking the buying-agents are not hiding heavy items in the cotton to cheat the scales.  Its a job that requires an honest person who can’t be bought by the agents.  After proving himself as a grader, Onono was promoted again to a Head Man, supervising all the shift-workers in the ginnery.

Then last season came the biggest promotion yet.  With only a couple of months left of the potential planting season, Onono was sent out to Latoro, 60km from Gulu, to manage the team rapidly planting 35ha of pine.  

He did an amazing job - those 35ha contains thousands of pine trees now, and I can’t imagine any machine making straighter lines than Onono’s team did.  I wish I had a photo to show you the view, as you drive towards the pine-land, where the overgrown bush that fills the northern Ugandan landscape is broken up by a sudden patch of neat, green rows of miniature trees in the distance.  Planted just last year, there are already some as tall as my shoulders, and covered in butterflies.  Latoro is blisteringly hot and there’s something so strange about standing sweating in that heat and smelling pine that reminds me of cycling through forests in Germany with my parents.  Uganda has one of the world’s worst deforestation rates, losing 2/3 of its forests in the last twenty years.  With that in mind, its awesome to think what it will be like to walk here beneath the pine canopy in 10 years time.  (Incredibly humid, I’d imagine…)

Onono spent this year planting another 130ha of pine while learning from a forestry expert consultant from South Africa, and now he’s solo managing another 160ha (he also got chased off another piece of land by some aggressive locals, which is a different story).  Onono’s on a roll to create a pretty cool legacy in his part of the world.

“My advice to younger women?”, offered the buxom 50-year-old Kenyan lady sat opposite me in the canteen, “marry now, while you’re in love, to get it out of your system, then you can get divorced in a few years and start really getting on with your career and your life.”   

We were at a Leadership Workshop for 60 female local entrepreneurs in Nairobi, as part of Goldman Sachs Foundation’s global 10,000 Women program.  The only problem was, Rutendo, Ghoncheh & I were the facilitators, and these ladies were teaching us far more than we were able to teach them.   

The day started with a rousing prayer full of clapping and shouting; even for the unreligious it warmed the blood against the surprisingly chilly Nairobi air.   In groups of 20 we began by sharing the stories behind the various company names.  I was amazed at how many women had incorporated their parents, husband’s or children’s names into the name of the business.  Two ladies even admitted they’d christened their younger children after the company, to make sure the whole family was included.  They were also impressively ambitious; phrases like ‘East Africa Ltd’, ‘Empire’ and ‘Global’ were the norm.

Next each lady ranked a list of 20 values - the kind that conflict in life every day such as family, accomplishment, wealth, love, recognition, integrity.  Via a lively game moving round the room to stand under numbers which represented their priorities, the ladies revealed a lot about the trade-offs they were making.  We discussed integrity, and almost all women ranked it 6^th or 7^th.  They wanted it to be higher, they said, but the reality was that rules had to be bent if they wanted their business to succeed – ‘tokens of appreciation’ have to be given to officials, customers have to be persuaded of the superior quality of cheap Chinese goods.  We discussed love, and all but one or two gathered en masse at the bottom rankings.  ‘Our men hold us back’, they said, ‘prioritise them at your peril.’  We discussed recognition and there was fierce debate between those who thought it essential to be role models for younger women, and those who thought it missed the point of what being a role model was about.  At the end we asked them to reveal their #1 ranked value – and all but a brave few stood next to Salvation, where a large group gathered and broke into spontaneous hallelujahs.  The most revealing comment was whispered to Rutendo as the group formed: “You can’t ask us that here; we’re all going to say our first priority is God, no matter what the truth is.”

Later in the afternoon (after a discussion about leadership styles that fell so flat I’m pretending it never happened) we discussed ways of giving feedback.  As facilitators, and perhaps naively, we showed the women a method called SBI (Situation, Behaviour, Impact) which encourages feedback based on facts, not feelings.  They launched a collective counter-attack, saying this ‘diplomacy’ was too soft for the uneducated people they employed.  They shared stories of workers who would be absent each day after their football team played, and employees who stayed late at work only to use the company buildings as a bedroom, and those workers who knew their importance and would use it to blackmail the CEO.  For these people, they recommended ‘shock therapy’ – losing it with them once every few months so they know that you’re not soft.  Eventually they came to an agreement – SBI was better than feedback based on feelings, but you should never be afraid to fire someone who is not committed, no matter how important they might seem.

Throughout the day these ladies intimidated me and inspired me in equal measure.  They, with their medium-sized businesses, are the ones really driving the local economy, creating jobs, investing in growth, pouring their money back into their children’s education.  They’re not doing it from a place of privilege, or as an ‘interesting career’.  They’re doing it out of ambition, passion and commitment to their family’s future - and as the lady I had lunch with reminded me, to show their daughters what women can do.

Its very quiet at the ginnery.  The loud buzz of the generator has gone, along with the whirring of the gin machines, the grumbling motors of the trucks, the clatter of cups and plates from the kitchen during tea breaks.  The compound is deserted.  The doors to the factory are padlocked.  After more than seven months of ginning, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, the last bit of fresh cotton has been separated into cotton lint and cotton seed.  

The action has moved to the farms, where many of the casual workers have rejoined extended families, hastily harvesting the first rainy season’s goods and planting for the second.  It’s Northern Uganda’s most feverishly busy farming season.  The ginnery’s field staff are travelling huge distances every day to reach as many farmers as possible for training.  They’re giving out the organic cotton bonus, reminding farmers of organic cotton techniques, training in the new chili crop, planting demonstration gardens, sowing trial plots for new seeds.  

Back at the compound, the silence is about to be broken by an overhaul of the factory.  The owners of the ginnery (who we rent from) have purchased new equipment:  faster, more modern gin machines, a conveyor to carry the lint through the factory floor, and an automatic bale-press that fills itself, measures the correct weight, and churns out bales twice as fast as the old one.

I can’t tell you which part of the pictured equipment is which, but I do know its going to make the ginnery much more efficient. 

After three years of exponential growth in the business, this kind of investment is now clearly worth it.  The factory will no longer be such a dusty relic from British colonial times, cringingly old-fashioned in the way it works and looks.  

But there’s also another side to it… With the automatic machinery, the ginnery won’t need six lint-collectors, or four weighers, or four bale-press operators, in any of the three shifts.  So forty-two jobs are wiped from the pay-roll.  Next year, the ginnery should add just as many in other areas, for grading & packing sesame & chilies, and processing cottonseed oil (more on that later), but its a clear reminder that ‘progress’ can actually mean fewer jobs. 

Yesterday I planted cotton for the first time.  And forgot to take my camera to record the momentous event.  

We planted about 1/3 of an acre of trial seeds at Okumu George William’s land.  Six or so farmers young & old, me, & Centurio & Peter from the ginnery.  We meticulously marked out 32 plots using pegs carved from sticks snapped off the trees & long pieces of string with caveras (plastic bags) tied in bows at regular intervals along them.  10m by 3.6m plots, with a marker every 30cm.  We used metal hoes to dig small holes at each cavera marker in the soil, then dropped three, four, or five seeds still lightly covered in cotton fluff into each one, and scooped the soil back over with our feet and pressed it down on top.  

No photos, so you can just imagine the details.  A fairly cloudy grey day, though still muggy and warm.  Five of George William’s children or nieces and nephews peering out wide-eyed from behind the trunk of a dead tree to watch the farmers work.  Soil the colour of charcoal, damp from fresh rains.  Maize stalks as tall as me leaning over in the next field.  White canvas bags bulging with seeds ready for planting.  A tape measure, rope tied on a bobbin, a metal hoe with half the wooden handle snapped off.  The cracked skin of an old farmers foot as he pushes the seeds down into the soil with his toes.

A few pictures from last week’s training for Field Officers…