The Punjab Village Where the Young Men Went to Canada
In a village near Jalandhar, nearly every family has a son in Brampton or Surrey. Njeri records the fathers who stayed, the farms they cannot work alone, and the one boy who came back.
The Tea Cooperative and the Buyer Who Stopped Paying
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Show notes
Six months of tea, no payment
Above Kerugoya, the Kiamutugu tea cooperative has four hundred members who pick green leaf every morning and deliver it to a factory that has not paid since March. Njeri spent a week in the village, walking the pickings, sitting in committee meetings and recording the veranda arguments afterwards. The episode follows one decision: whether to keep delivering.
- A picking morning from 5am, recorded in the rows
- How the payment system works and where the money stopped
- The committee meeting that ran four hours
- Three families and what the missing money has meant
- The vote, and what happened the following Monday
Njeri returns to Kiamutugu in a later episode. Members are named by first name only.
Transcript
Hello, I am Njeri Mwangi and this is Dust Road Dispatches, the show that goes to the places the news vans drive past and stays long enough to understand them. I grew up on a smallholding near Nyeri, so this first episode is close to home. Above the town of Kerugoya, four hundred families pick tea every morning and deliver it to a factory that has not paid them since March. Six months of leaf, no money. I spent a week there, walking the rows at five in the morning, sitting through a committee meeting that ran four hours, and listening on the verandas afterwards where the real arguments happen. The whole episode turns on one question: do they keep delivering. By the end, they vote. You will hear the sound of that room. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts.
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