To everybody who is concerned: we’re still alive.
After a month of radio silence, I’m (Lauren) back and can’t wait to tell you all about it. But first of all, I want to ask for a minute of silence for the once who didn’t come home yet. As you probably know, it was planned that I went to Congo for only three weeks and that I had to leave Jonas alone in the forest. So said so done, Jonas is still making his way through the rainforest seeking some coffee.
You’re probably wondering what the hell we did and what Jonas is doing the next couple of weeks. Well, we walked, walked and walked,... sometimes picked a leave from a coffee tree or climbed it and ... that’s it in a nutshell.
The first thing we needed to do was to find some wild Robusta coffee of course. As we’re still newbies to the morphology of the C. canephora tree, we got the company of three extremely good trained botanists: Bienfait, Ithé and Tsjimie. When we didn’t see the wood for the trees, they could just spot them from miles away. Armed with machetes and two guides, we tackled the woods and soon we found our first wild coffee trees. After finding 2 or more, we were able to make a plot and start collecting samples. And this we did from Monday to Saturday, two weeks long.
After those two weeks of wandering in the woods, it was time for me to say goodbye. After an emotional farewell, I returned to Belgium with a good amount of samples and a new experience on my CV.
Only 19 nights sleep until the dream team is reunited again and then you can expect a continuation of this report.
Special thanks to Axel Fassio/CIFOR for the amazing pictures of the field work.