I am glad I followed through my promise to send Adam and Tony Ugandan. Adam promptly got in touch and started asking a lot of questions about how I had come by this tea and how easy was it to get hold of other stuff from Uganda.
All this was by email being a curious so and so, I picked up the phone and asked why Adam wanted to know all this sort of information. It was at this point that he opened up to me. Like me he had Tony had turned up in Leicester and later in London with a view to meeting some Ugandan Asians. They wanted to start trading ethically and were already in talks with a company owned by a Uganda Asian whom they believed would help them “change” their ways however for some unknown reasons the person they had been in talks with stopped retuning their calls or emails and appeared to have dropped off the face of the earth.
They therefore wondered if I could help them through my contacts in Uganda and other African countries. This was late November 2008. I got as much information for them as I possibly could and I was suddenly hit by a feeling of “I am being used” I told them I would not provide further information from that point unless they were willing to pay for it as it was costing me money and time to find it.
They told me they didn’t have the sort of money I was asking and therefore were walking away. Something in me told me to look a little closer at this, so I asked them more questions about their intentions and with this information we were able to bring people that we each know from different walks of life and we had 3 hour meeting talking through the pros and cons of the idea.. the search for Ethical coffee had begun..
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