Ethiopia.
Ethiopia.
It’s half a globe away — part of a continent teaming with complexity, crushing poverty and eye-opening experiences. The parallels to Kona’s lush and relatively affluent slopes are few.
But coffee is a common denominator. In fact, Ethiopia is the birthplace of the cherished beverage, as well as all of humanity.
This history was not lost on Charles Brown, a retired general surgeon who has farmed some of South Kona’s fine bean for a decade. So when the chance arose to trade knowledge and lend a helping hand in the orchards of that storied country, Brown jumped at it.
Transportation, health care, communication — it’s all a crap shoot on the Dark Continent. Brown struggled with a lack of Internet service but was able to provide this newspaper with a patchwork series of updates over the past few weeks.
“So far I have been forced to realize that the trees are far different from ours in appearance, so many of the problems are different, and limited resources prevent many things Kona coffee farmers take for granted,” Brown said in one email dispatch from the town of Dilla, a day’s drive from the capitol. Brown owns Wailapa Farms, with five acres in organic coffee, and Hawaiian Sunrise Farms, which produces another eight acres.
In Ethiopia, he has bankrolled experimentation on 1,000 coffee seedlings in an effort to get a higher success rate with the young trees. He found the farmers should be starting trees in pots before planting them out, rather than the prevailing bare-root technique which leads to the trees withering unless rain conditions are ideal.
Brown helped coffee farmers with other issues as they scratched a living from the soil.
“The trees were being planted too deep and the farmers had the idea that piling up some extra dirt in contact with the newly planted tree was helpful,” he said. “Common sense would tell you that putting the tree deeper would be better, but it is a bad idea.”
Other challenges — like a lack of wastewater treatment — were far beyond his ability to address.
The trip was a three-week stint with the Catholic Relief Services Farmer-to-Farmer Program, which works to improve food security and the economy through agricultural development. Some 500 volunteers are working on assignment ranging from a week to six weeks in Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania, with their expenses covered by the U.S. Agency for International Development.
There was a saying among Peace Corps volunteers in the mid 1990s that those who volunteered in South America come back revolutionaries, but those who spend two years in Africa come back laughing — because that’s what the local people do, as the only other option is to cry at the enormous struggles of that region.
Brown laughed with the locals, relishing the glee on both sides as each tried to mouth the words of the other’s language. But like anyone traveling to Africa for the first time because they care, he also received a dose of sobriety.
He summed it up this way: “It was mind-expanding for me and a great experience. Although I laughed a lot along the way, the overall magnitude of their problems with poverty and overpopulation didn’t leave me with a cheery feeling. There are big gaps in the knowledge about what needs to be done — and the resources to do it.”