Christine Bleakley's Uganda Diary: Day three - Oliva's coffee business
| 14:33 UK time, Wednesday, 11 March 2009
In January I travelled to Uganda with Comic Relief to report on the work that needs to be done to improve the lives of the people of there. This is third day from my diary.
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Read all of my diary entries here.
Watch all of the films I made for Comic Relief here.
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Wednesday 7th Jan 2009
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After a treacherous six hour drive and a bit of sleep we prepare ourselves for the first day of filming. I'm the only member of the crew who hasn't been to Africa before so
I'm wide-eyed and amazed by everything. We travel high up into the mountains, about a five hour drive from the capital Kampala to meet with Oliva Kishero and her family.
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Oliva's mother died when she was 13 years old leaving her to raise her siblings as her father left for another woman. Her new commitments meant dropping out of school. At 16 she married and got pregnant. All they had to their names was a small coffee growing plot. It was Oliva that made that small piece of land into a business. She would trek the ten kilometres to the market in Kamu with heavy sacks of coffee beans on her back. She sold to local buyers for very low prices. That was on a good day. Sometimes she couldn't sell her beans at all and had to take them all the way back home again.
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But her sheer determination has seen her farm grow, in conjunction with the Gumintindo Coffee Co-operative and Comic Relief. She's built a new house and is pouring her
energy into sending her children, and the children she has adopted, to school. She sees their success as her legacy.
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It takes a special kind of women to succeed and be respected by her male peers in this society, and that is what Oliva has accomplished. In the main town of Mbale the money provided by the Gumintindo Co-Operative (which Oliva is now heavily involved in) has seen the construction of a storage facility to help the local farmers store their crops. Oliva has a vision and Comic Relief is helping her achieve it.
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Christine x
* Read all of Christine's diary entries here
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* See a gallery of pictures of Christine in Uganda
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Ìý* Info on how to donate to Comic Relief
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Ìý* View all our pages on Comic Relief, where you can play our doodle quiz, bid on the Comic Relief doodle bookÌý auction and watch all our Comic Relief videos.
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