The Coffee from Ndurutu Wet Mill

Its been a while, after my trip to Neustadt on the Baltic Sea, i literally 'packed' the 'boys' in the car and headed to the Mountains of Salzburg in Austria......it was a great 7 days! i didnt get to ride  The Untersberg cable-car but i had an amazing time and ofcourse visited the birthplace of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart...
Anyway back to our Journey....
Before i left for the mountains, our much awaited container carrying the coffee from Ndurutu Wet Mill; Rutuma Cooperative arrived at the port of Bremen. 

I couldnt make it to Bremen, but my Partner - the one person who gave my village the hope of development through sustainable coffee production was there to receive the coffee.

Nicole Boedtger receiving the coffee from Ndurutu Wet mill in Bremen

offloading the Ndurutu coffee in Bremen-Germany

I will highlight a bit of information about Ndurutu  Mill and how much this means to me.
When i was growing up we used to deliver our coffee at the Marua cooperative which is appx. 5km from the village of Ndurutu. All the farmers from the villages of Ndurutu, Kahiga, Kirichu, Kanuna,Ndathiini, Kiganjo to mention but a few would join in clusters and have a 'collection point' where the tractor from Marua made its slow than ever journeys collecting the produce to be wet processed at the mill in Marua. Our collection point was at the mainroad on the turn to Ndurutu village on the Kiganjo- Nanyuki road. This meant endless hours and ques of us children waiting at these collection points for our produce to be weighed and documented...in this time our parents would be running other chores.
I remember how my childhood friends and 'gang members ' like John Murage, Joyce Wanjiru, Lawrence Mwangi etc would devise 'mean' ways and be ahead of the que....and then my amazing brother Davie discovered that he could 'literally camp' at the collection centre, using and empty sack on the que he would secure a place for me and my sister as we struggled with heavy loads of the coffee sacks on our back, terkking 1 1/2 kms from our Hilly farm, under the hot African sun....

women farmers delivering coffee

The coffee from Ndurutu wet mill means a lot to all of us at Chania Coffee and Kedovo e.V because this mill was put up by the then Marua Farmers Cooperative Society in 1996.We were all old enough to help with digging the trenches, passing on the heavy stones...etc
Our parents constructed the mill because the whole village was tired of trekking 5 kms with coffee sacks on our backs, in the hot January weather, in the chilly foggy July weather, in the rainy muddy Sept weather...All the villages came in numbers and the mill was constructed ...for days and nights. Our parents still to date deliver their coffee to this mill...its the 'jewel' of the village.
My mother now doesnt walk 5kms with the coffee on her back, she walks 500 metres to the mill!! my brother says she even leaves onions frying on the pan, delivers her coffee and shes back in the kitchen before the onions brown ;)  
With the purchase of this coffee, my partner Sandtorkai Handel Papenhagen has supported our development work. The next couple of months the team in KEDOVO-Kenya will be so busy intiating and facilitating our various projects:

Ndurutu Wet Mill

 This time we will support the education requirements for the children of Ndurutu Primary School, the team will identify the most pressing issues and we will fully support those children and empower them with the gift of Education in conducive environments- our work will range from purchase of uniforms, support with school fees, support with text books, purchase of new desks, renovations of blackboards and classrooms etc

classroom ndurutu primary school.

We will work with the Neema Caregivers, a group of 10 dedicacted women who labour beyond odds to cater for their families and still have time and energy to take care of the Neema Rescue and Rehabilitation Centre; the centre that we support to ensure those formers street kids have a roof, an education and a future...
Kedovo kenya will launch, train,facilitate & monitor Income Generating Projects for these women- how they can set up small businesses that can generate income and lead to self reliance...

Soni with the Neema Women group

We will expand our project of Sustainable coffee farming and incoporate 10 more farmers to the intial pilot project. These farmers will undergo intensive trainings on Agronomy as well as Agribusiness- to us coffee production should give the farmers a decent income.We can have all the certifications there is in the world of coffee, but they will be irrelevant to our producers if they cannot feed their families....

We will dig up the Kedovo farm in Chaka and realise our training project of Enähr das Dorf- Feed the village.The team in Kenya will train the community on best sustainable farming practises that are not dependent on climate and weather patterns.

  

To my dear Roasters in Germany, our partners in this journey, all the people who continue believing in our journey,we have a lot of work ahead of us... lets make it happen.

We are currently offerring the Ndurutu coffee, late harvest 2013/ 2014 F.O.T Bremen- transport to other destination within Germany arrangable at a cost. 

Please contact Nicole Boedtger or Soni Schneidewind for samples, price quoatations and contracting.

To my partner Sandtorkai Handel Papenhagen, thankyou for giving my farmers a chance to thrive, for giving their children a chance to better education, thankyou for giving me and my people a chance to tell our story....

Our journey continues....

signed Soni