Wazungu Overload

Upon my return to Moshi I got to spend a couple days with a delegation organized by Just Coffee, a worker-owned coffee roasting cooperative based in Madison, Wisconsin. Apparently I really like people from Wisconsin because I thought they were great. We talked about coffee and coops and cafes. It was energizing and I felt I could openly discuss with them my frustrations and criticisms of KNCU and Equal Exchange, while they honestly shared their feelings about Just Coffee and the farmer coops they’d been visiting. I’m very curious to learn more about Just Coffee’s worker-owner model, particularly as it relates to non-owner employees. They are 1/10th the size of EE and it sounds like far from perfect, but the coops could probably learn a few things from each other. And I’m sure have. The group was only in Moshi for a few days but they had spent a week in Ethiopia, a week in Uganda, and were ending with a week in Tanzania. They may have just been a bunch of coffee tourists, but they were my kind of people: curious and community-minded, taking advantage of an opportunity to learn more deeply about the world and the industry in which they are a part.

On Saturday I met another group of wazungu visiting KNCU, from Café Direct in the UK. I didn’t get to spend as much time with them but they seemed pretty cool as well. The two groups had very similar itineraries at KNCU, but on different days so their paths didn’t cross. I made an effort to bring them together on Saturday night.

Being introduced to these groups as a representative of Equal Exchange, spending two weeks talking about Equal Exchange Café with Kate, and then discussing EE and coops with the Just Coffee group has gotten the gears moving in my head again. I’m thinking about EE cafes, and with the same passion and angst I had in Boston. Kate jokes that it’s only in body that I don’t work there anymore, and in a way it’s true. I’m constantly trying to stay updated on the café’s goings-on, and thinking of ways to help it. Both the EE and KNCU café projects are so rich with potential that it’s all the more frustrating when they fall short.