Ntagahoraho Philip

I am 65 years old

I have 7 children.

We live by farming and herding.

I started cultivating coffee when I was very young.

When I finished my school, I started cultivating coffee, because I liked it and I saw my parents were doing this activity. I was helping my parents and thought that by cultivating coffee on this land we would have good results.

Our land is not very big. It is around 4 or 5 hectare.

This land has 377 coffee trees, but in total we have 1120 trees.

We like the life of farming very much, but it is very challenging. It is challenging because there is not much production at the moment.

When it is the time of harvesting we are very happy, because they are so many advantages in comparison to other periods.

To maintain the coffee is not easy and it is expensive. The process from when you start with cultivating to the period where the coffee is ready asks much labor. It asks much work of us. We had enough dried grasses on the hills. Such grasses came from bananas, but now we don’t have bananas anymore. We still see that this work can be difficult. There are barriers. We like it very much to have the vegetables and coffee combined. Another challenge is that we don’t have sufficient chemicals.

We bought lands and we see that we get animals which we didn’t have before as well as the lands. Because of the coffee, we are able to have the animals and the land.

We are old. Otherwise we should put much effort in cultivating of the coffee. Our children are not working very hard for the coffee as we are. We continue to mobilize the children to work for the coffee and we wish that it can improve and that it will keep improving over the coming years.