Interview
What is your name?
Sinzotuma Fidele
How old are you?
70 years old.
How many children do you have?
Including those who got out of my house I have 8 children.
How is living like in this area?
You don’t see that the hunger is there? We have a difficult life.
When did you start farming coffee?
I started 30 years ago.
Why did you start farming coffee?
We thought about it in order to get some advantages. We were finding something that could help us.
How big is you land?
Our land is not very big, but someone who wants to plant can put it in the land. I think it is 1 hectare and it is occupied by trees. We find many trees there.
How many coffee trees do you have?
150 trees of coffee.
Which things in life bring you joy?
What makes us happy is when we cultivate coffee. For instance when we cultivate coffee, if they add something for us that allows us to see some advantages. We should be happy with the coffee plant and we should maintain it every time so to allow it to be more fruitful than it is currently.
What do you like about coffee farming?
What makes us love coffee? We love to work for it in order to allow it to help us because it brings us much money. But when we evaluate we see that with all the work we did there is actually no gain.
What are some of the main challenges you have in coffee farming?
The problems we meet when cultivating coffee is to maintain the trees and to put the grasses around the trees. That is a problem as far as harvesting is concerned. When the coffee is mature, we have no problems.
What are some things in life that changed since you started coffee farming?
When bad vegetables arise from the land it asks us to remove the vegetables many times. That is why we want to see ourselves get other things we can do. I barely get enough to make me survive.
What are your hopes/dreams for the future?
We hope that the people will remember us so that we get more advantages from the coffee. We can work better to allow the coffee tree to be of good quality.
In 2023 Fidele contributed 150kg of coffee cherries to Migoti’s Murambi lot. In 2022 he contributed 101kg, and in 2021 he contributed 335kg.
What are the grasses referred to by coffee farmers?
During dry season, farmers cut and dry long grasses, which they then put around their trees for the purpose of mulching (covering land to reduce weeds and help soil retain moisture).
Location
Images (21 Files)
Murambi Hill - Fidele - Google Drive
drive.google.com
Fidele Sinzotuma can be used for content around any of the coffees produced from the ‣.