Tea-leaves & transformation

As a new mum I can remember that ‘sucked-inside-out’ feeling, when tiredness came to live in my bones and there were moments when I felt so exhausted I could have happily laid down on the kitchen lino and nodded off in an instant – Have you ever felt that tired?

This last week we have been staying in sight of Mt Kenya, running another Leadership for Hope programme – this time for tea pickers and workers in the huge Tea processing factories. As part of our prep for the training we took a trip out to a tea farm and factory. Under the tutorship of Mr Chai, our guide for the day, we learnt about the lives of the 60,000 small-holders in the tea growing region, eking out a living on between 800-10,000 acres of rolling hills, planted with tea-bushes that must be nursed and tended from dawn to dusk. The precious leaves are picked by patient souls who traverse their fields for 8 hours each day, come rain or shine, filling their back-baskets with between 20-40kg of leaves each day….and tealeaves aren’t heavy!

Mr Chai explains how to pick the best leaves

It’s easy to be mesmerised and delighted by the eye-popping beauty of the patchwork hillsides of seductive greens, or the intriguing processes within the Tea factories themselves, but the everyday reality for these tea-folk paints a different story. It’s a grim and relentless reality…no days off, no slipping off work early and no relief from the grinding cycles of poverty, debt and hopelessness. You see the women walking for miles, delivering their baskets of leaves 2 or 3 times a day to their local factory and then queuing to get them weighed… and tomorrow and forever will be the same.

This week we were joined by Jon & Andy from the UK

 So, this week we met some of these tea pickers and learnt about their lives. And through the training they were able to gain insight into how they could learn to diversify (not just rely on tea growing), how they could start to break their cycles of debt, to change their entrenched mind-sets of hopelessness and move towards a new found self-esteem. 

It was another amazing week, but at times it was as emotionally enjoyable as pushing a beer-barrel up Everest….our batteries were definitely needing to find a source of refreshment.

We are now half way through our Kenya trip and tiredness has arrived. But what we realised this evening, after training 250 young Catholic priests from across Kenya this morning, that even if you are surrounded by challenges, you still have the opportunity to grow and flourish (not just collapse on the lino).  Currents of weariness are just part of the marvellous mix, that swirl around us and have the ability to move us forwards to places of deep joy further down stream.

Alice

As the sun sets I know that what we are doing is a profound honour, it's changing lives and bringing hope. I’m reminded of the face of people like 70 year old tea-picker Alice, standing in front of 320 people yesterday morning, telling her story of how her life has turned around in amazing ways in the past three days.

She was shining for all to see.

- JB