The Tea Cooperative and the Buyer Who Stopped Paying
In the Kenyan highlands, four hundred smallholders delivered tea for six months to a factory that stopped sending money. Njeri spends a week with them as they decide what to do.
The Punjab Village Where the Young Men Went to Canada
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Show notes
A village of fathers and empty rooms
In Doaba, the Punjab region that sends more young men to Canada than anywhere in India, Njeri stayed four days in a village where visa posters outnumber shop signs. The fathers farm alone, the mothers run the house and the video calls, and every house has a floor nobody lives on. A portrait of a place built around absence.
- The visa agents on the main road and what they charge
- A wheat harvest with no sons to help
- The 9pm video call ritual with Brampton
- The big houses, the empty floors and the gurdwara donations
- Gurpreet, twenty-six, who came back, and why
Punjabi passages translated in the transcript. Thanks to the Dhillon family for the lassi.
Transcript
Welcome back to Dust Road Dispatches. I am Njeri Mwangi, and this episode takes us to Doaba, the part of Punjab that has sent more of its sons to Canada than anywhere else in India. In the village where I stayed, near Jalandhar, the visa agent posters outnumber the shop signs, and almost every house has a top floor that nobody lives on. The fathers bring in the wheat alone. The mothers run the house and the nine o'clock video call to Brampton. For four days I recorded a place that has arranged its whole life around people who are not there. And then I met Gurpreet, who is twenty-six, and who came back. He is the only one. He tells me why, and his father tells me what he thinks of that. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts.
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