Tropical Wholefoods Director Richard Friend's second blog from Afghanistan where he has been visiting our Fairtrade Raisin partners, Parwan Raisin Producer Cooperative.

Richard with PRPC members

 Am slightly put out when I wake at 3.15 am. Also its a Shia festival today so the Muezzin are up early and start the call to prayer at 3.30 accompanied by supportive car horns. Not helpful, the cake and pepsi option for the farmer meeting means a 6am start, I close the windows and turn on the rattily fan. Seems to do the trick and its time to get up in no time.    

Chirpy and refreshed we miss the worst traffic and make the journey north to Charicar in an hour and a half. We meet at one of the cooperative collection centres, and greet every one. Every new comer greets everyone with a hand shake or touch of the wrist or side to side hug or cheek to cheek touch, depending on status, kinship, friendship or combination thereof. Aman and I are given the place of honour furthest from the door. Eventually we start although each late comer still greets everyone. Its a lively and good humoured meeting except when due to a mistranslation the coop chairman thinks I want to take over his position rather than just chairing the meeting and makes a rather impassioned speech in response.  Everyone puts away their guns and laughs (of course there were no guns, just pandering to your stereotype dear reader).  After an hour and a half of my talking and Aman translating on the forthcoming FLO audit everyone is well ready for a cake and pepsi  break. Good call Aman! Its a very generous portion of very dry madeira cake so I mostly stick to the pepsi, blaming the large breakfast I didn't have.

Richard addressing PRPC meeting

The Panshir restaurant is bedecked with pictures of the Lion of Panshir, Amad Shar Masood the Mujahedeen commander and national hero assassinated by Al-Qaeda suicide bombers on 09/09/2001(two days before the twin towers attack). Its cheap, clean and very busy. The restaurant is presided by a captivating, booming voiced master of ceremonies.  He seats customers and takes and shouts their orders to the kitchen. Although he takes no notes when the customers leave, he shouts what they have eaten to the blue eyed owner at the till by the door. Great performance.  We have a good meeting discussing volumes and terms for and distribution of the fairtrade pre-payments with the coop board over kebabs, Kabuli rice and pepsi. I stick to the rice and pepsi. 

The road to Kabul is just wide enough and in good enough condition to get some real speed up before attempting an overtaking feat of eye popping fearlessness. Unfortunately I fell asleep and missed most of the fun. However back in KabuI I was moved when an individual, who faced with the tiresome prospect of circumnavigating a large roundabout, drove against the direction of travel, crossed two traffic streams and forced himself into his desired lane. Sadly the road condition was too poor to attempt this at speed so no gold medal for our driver but still highly commended. I managed a horse bravo but in hindsight it warranted at least polite applause.

Fairtrade raisins are in
Oxfam shops, www.tropicalwholefoods.com
and health food shops.

Back to the guest house and invited the two resident MC staff to share my tomato and aubergine yum. Always a good story to be had from these folk, however Mikes are in the champions league. He has spent much of the last six years living and working with nomadic tribesmen in 30 provinces of Afghanistan (also Sudan and Kenya). No not the sort of job you see many adverts for. He runs a successful conflict management program solving problems between settled and nomadic peoples all over Afghanistan. There are plenty of these because of increasing settlement on traditional range land. The Afghan climate produces a low animal carrying capacity on permanently settled land so nomad animal stock accounts for nearly 70% in Afghanistan and nearly all of the breeding stock. The Kuchi nomads are therefore important to the country but unpopular with settled people (like travellers everywhere).

Tropical Wholefoods in Afghanistan
Technical Director Richard Friend's been in Afghanistan working with our partner Parwan Raisin Producer Cooperative (PRPC) helping them to prepare for their first Fairtrade inspection. This week, we have heard that the inspection was successful and that Parwan are now Fairtrade certifed raisin producers. Hurrah! Here are a few of Richard's blogs sent from Afghanistan. 07.40 arrival in Kabul Airport. I fill out the foreigner registration form, recruiting the very bored official to help select two pictures from my collection seems to do the trick, he is slightly amused and doesn't bother me about my tourist visa and uncomplainingly uses my sleep deprived spider scrawl to glean all the information he needs to fill out a card in a similarly illegible scrawl to my own, to which he attaches and stamps my picture. This is very good as failure to gain - albeit a completely illegible - foreigner identification card can lead to i) The need to visit the appropriate ministry for a half day queue / scrum. ii) Hassle if you get stopped without one (theoretically likely as passport checks for foreigners are very common although nobody asks for the card.) iii) The need to pay a fine when trying to leave. Several techy ex-pats don't want to fill in the form "can we get one from somewhere else" "from the ministry". "where is the ministry" "in the city" accompanied with a low energy gesture in the presumed direction of Kabul.
Once outside, my small pleasure of getting a trolley to the side where you can push into the queue for the bag receipt checkers is dissipated as can't find Aman (our man in Kabul). I call Aman wait for 30 minutes in the sun, call again, drink two cans of lemonade before wandering off in the direction of car park C. No need! Here he is sitting down in the shade of the waiting area 30 metres from where I was standing. From here onto a Mercy Corps guest house called Montana Base. I have been here before. It's a three storey shared self-catering accommodation for ex-pat staff members, much less lonely than a hotel which makes it much more comfortable. Sleep.
13.00 Kabul. Time to start work at Mercy Corps office "Kilo base". Preparation for the Raisin Producer Cooperative General Assembly where I am to speak tomorrow. We meet the MC security head to get permission to go to Charicar since there are security restrictions in Kabul due to an international conference. It's ok. Aman is wants to discuss the catering arrangements at length. We agree on cake and Pepsi for the farmers' meeting and lunch in Charicar with the coop board. To pull off the cheaper cake and pepsi option we need to get finished by 12 or meat and rice will be required! Hopefully we can do the board meeting over lunch so we can get back before the international conference stops the traffic. Back to Montana Base via Finest Supermarket. Finest has quite robust anti ram raid / suicide bomb defences and you get frisked on the way in but in other respects it's like a very expensive down market Sainsbury's. Write up my stuff, cook some tea and it's time for bed.