mattamatix

Just within the past week, Matt's life just went from about a 15 mph pace to seemingly 65mph. There are two major contributors to that change... the Accompong Farmer's Cooperative and the Peace Corps Volunteer Advisory Committee.

A couple of years ago JACOM, the group out of Minnesota that has adopted Accompong as a “sister” community of sorts helped to develop a farmers' cooperative group. Over the past couple of years it has made some slow progress, falteringly. A lack of strong central leadership locally is one of a couple of reasons why it hasn't taken off quicker. The idea of a cooperative is somewhat foreign to many of these farmers, so the idea of each man working for himself seems to be the default model. Many of the central figures in the JACOM group were here this past week, and we had a lot of time to sit down and try to formulate a plan for moving forward...

The Farmers' Cooperative at this point is going to focus on two things, starting a chicken hatchery that would supply eggs to the local people who raise chickens. Right now anybody who raises chickens drives the 45 minutes down to Santa Cruz every 3 to 6 weeks to buy chicks. We estimate that there about 20-25 people in Accompong alone who raise chickens on a regular basis, not to mention other nearby communities. If we can set up a hatchery and sell the eggs for the same price that they do in Santa Cruz, and meanwhile save people the hassle of traveling, then it might be the start of a nice profit base for the Farmers' Cooperative. The long term plan is to build a chicken coop and raise our own broilers to sell to the local sausage factory. For now though we'll stick with just the hatchery plan.

The second, and original, mission of the Farmers' Cooperative is to develop a cash crop of high quality coffee for export purposes. JACOM has already done the leg-work back home of setting up a marketing outlet for any coffee that is produced here through the Farmers' Cooperative. The eventual goal is to be growing only certified organic coffee, but that is a couple years off yet. In the next month we have a greenhouse to erect which is to be used for growing coffee trees during their first tender year before they can be transplanted into the field, and seeds to source and buy. In the meantime we are going to try a pilot program of sorts in which the Farmers' Cooperative would become the local coffee buyer and processor. We would buy “cherries”(just picked coffee beans) form local growers, pulp them, ferment them, dry them, and then export them to Minnesota where there they would be roasted, packaged and sold, with most of the profit coming back into the Accompong Farmers' Cooperative.

Peace Corps Volunteer Advisory Committee (VAC)... VAC exists in every country that the Peace Corps serves in. Essentially it is the voice of the volunteers to Peace Corps Jamaica staff funneled through an elected executive council... volunteer representation and advocacy. Matt was just elected to be Treasurer of VAC this past week. As a result his level of responsibility and workload just quadrupled. Not so much because he has a lot of funds to manage but more so because each VAC member represents all the volunteers on island. There are a lot of meetings to attend, e-mails to respond to and phone calls to make.

p.s. Because Jamaican's tend to associate 'Matt' with a doormat. Matt's new 'yard name' is mattamatix. (mathematics for all you rocket scientists out there)