Ndayahaga Gerome

I am 66 years old.

In total I have 12 children, some are still at home and some are already out of the house.

We live well, but things are difficult. The things of today they are not going well.

For so many years. When you see my age, you know I cultivated coffee for a long time. I started cultivating coffee when I got married. I got married in 1977, so I began cultivating coffee 50 years ago.

The coffee trees had much value before the inflation of other things, but now things became expensive, the money we get for the coffee is not sufficient anymore.

We do not always know the measures of our lands, but the size of the land is big. Many hectares. I have different lands at different places, because I bought them separately every time I got money.

1250 trees.

Living. We are happy to have life.

What I said earlier, we like it before when it gave us money. But now there is inflation and the money is not enough anymore.

We face problems with the grasses. Before using the grasses, we were using banana leaves, but now the banana plants are disappearing. The leaves of the bananas are very expensive. For the land you have to spend much money, which is higher than the money you will get from the production. Because it is necessary to maintain the coffee well, the costs are high.

Even though now we get money from the coffee, the prices of other things are very expensive. So what you earn from the coffee is almost useless. Like for instance what happened recently. All the prices went up, before people waited to see how things would evolve.

In the future, my hopes are that the prices of coffee will be higher. Because they said it is the first in Burundi, from what I understood on the radio. Russians appreciate the coffee very much, but they did not give us the exact price for the coffee. On the coffee station we hope to get 3000 BIF. This can make us happy. Even the kg of casava flour is currently expensive. Another idea is that they should give us our payment as early as possible. For instance I asked and they said we will be paid in March and in September. So now we like them to give us credits which we can use to buy school materials for our children to go to school. This is how we can save ourselves from poverty.