Fruit pics from Terrespoir trip

Cameroon is a cornucopia of fresh fruits and vegetables, among other things. It's a real pleasure to have some pictures of a few of these to share, from our road trip last week. Enjoy!

The trip was to visit with fruit dryers associated with a Swiss-Cameroonian NGO called Terrespoir. Their growers and dryers produce fruit for export to Switzerland. Every Friday, Terrespoir collects the fresh and dried fruit at a church in the port city of Douala, boxes it, and loads it on a truck. The truck heads to the cargo port at Douala airport, where the food is loaded into small containers and onto a pallet for air shipment to Switzerland. This is the process we saw on our trip, starting with the dryers and moving on to the collection point and the airport, omitting only the farms where the fruit is grown.

Terrespoir is a member of RELUFA, the Cameroonian NGO network we volunteer with. The trip was a fact-finding mission for our coworker Christi to find out more about how the business works, because RELUFA is interested in getting involved with fair trade. This, if you haven't heard of it, is a worldwide movement to get more of the revenues for products, especially food, back to the actual producers. We took a lot of pictures, some of them interesting, so this is just the first installment.

Boxing papayas for shipment.

From left, boxed eggplant, ginger and limes.

Passionfruit!

Small hot peppers. The tasty and ubiquitous Cameroonian pimante sauce is made from these.

Plantains and sugarcane. There was only one box of sugarcane that we saw, so this may be a snack for the workers rather than an export product. It's sold all over the place here in Yaounde as a snack, in short lengths like this. Incidentally, the Coca-Cola here is made with sugar, not corn syrup, and so is a bit less sweet, and to my mind much tastier, probably because this is what it tasted like when I was a kid in the US.

Boxing mangos. Like everyone else we met here, this lady was all smiles and laughter until it was picture time, when she assumed her serious demeanor.

Loading the truck with pineapple.

More mangoes. This lady is laughing because just out of frame to the left, her friend is harassing and teasing her to crack her up for the camera. After the picture she actually jumped up and, laughing, gave her a smack.

This is some of the dried fruit. Each individual bag is stamped with a date, a lot number, and the name of the dryer. Terrespoir checks the weight and labeling of each individual bag when it is boxed up on Friday, and visually inspects the fruit (bananas, in this case) through the window in the front of the package. If there's any problem with the product, Terrespoir ships it back from Switzerland and docks the dryers not only the cost of the fruit itself, but the cost of air freight.