Fairtrade coffee project in Sidamo

Women with goat, originally uploaded by CharlesFred.

Just catching up..... I did manage to make it to the party on Saturday as luckily enough I remembered that I had imported my address book from mozilla thunderbird to the new google account whih I had to open as part of google having taken over blogger... so I managed to fire off an e-mail just in time and get an answer.

It was a very nice party and we ended up going into the centre for a dance at Studio 80. Unfortunately, I woke up the next day feeling terrible... a bad hangover, like the one I suffered in Sa Pa in northern Vietnam, only this time I had not actually drunken that much, although maybe I had mixed my drinks a bit. So, I spent the day in bed until the last few rounds of the men's 10 km speed skating, which was won in world record time by Sven Kramer.

I feel a lot better today and with no computer at home and a pile of papers needing to be sorted out, tax bills to be refused and other bills to pay, I spent the morning going through my administration, listening to the Adrian Sherwood CD together with a pile of LP's from downstairs. So good to have a break of 13 years of listening to records as they sound so fresh after such a break. A big surprise was listening to Yvonne Fair's The Bitch is Black. Not a very nice title for what is a formidable soul record from the mid-1970's. I had bought this off the internet about five years ago but had never got round to listening to it before. So, with Fred at work, the house otherwise empty, it was possible to turn UP the volume and enjoy!

There was also another nice surprise this morning when the man from Deutsche Post arrived with a small parcel. A parcel containing a bar of chocolate and a packet of coffee and a poster with this photo on it! I had been contected just a couple of weeks ago on flickr by a lady asking if she could use this photo in an article about Ethiopia and a fairtrade coffee project in Sidamo, and here it was! A very nice gesture.

By coincidence, there is a very interesting programme on Dutch TV this evening about Tony Chocolonely and slavery-free chocolate. More about this another time, maybe.