Thanksgiving Coffee Company

As I’ve written elsewhere on this blog, our work, and fair trade in general is about relationships. When it boils down to it, relationships are what hold this model together and what make it so powerful. Relationships shape this complicated and layered global economic exchange and mold it in the image of community, transform the blind, exploitative, and unsustainable relationships of times past and heal them.

So it’s a great joy to see those relationships deepening, like I have over the past week. Far away, in the east of Uganda, a delegation from the Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation of Evanston (Illinois) is visiting the Peace Kawomera Cooperative.

Our friend Rabbi Brant Rosen has been keeping an account on his blog, Shalom Rav.

Here’s an excerpt:

I’ve written extensively about Mirembe on this blog - largely because I have just been so inspired by the example they set for us. I truly believe that the folks at this modest coop in Uganda are, in their way, showing the rest of the world how to live.

(Brant’s posted a few more times on JRC’s visit to the cooperative, and also on their experience in Rwanda where they are involved with a number of truly inspiring projects…so please take a minute to read backwards and forwards from the link above!)

Also, another member of the JRC delegation, Hannah Gelder, is keeping a blog where she wrote about her experience with Peace Kawomera. Check it out here.

Thanks to our friends at JRC who have made this project such an important part of their community. You’d be hard pressed to find a cup of coffee at their synagogue that’s not fair trade from the farmers of the Peace Kawomera, or make it through a community event without running into someone (probably with the last name Waxman!) hawking packages for people to take home.

And if this sounds exciting, amazing, and fun…why don’t you get your community involved?

Yours in Peace,

Ben

This entry was posted by BCM on Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 at 9:04 am and is filed under Exciting news, Interfaith Organizing, Sharing with you..., Views from Uganda. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.