We are only a couple of weeks into 2012 and already the ETP staff are racking up the miles.
Our two African staff, Jane and Wagurah are both in Uganda at the moment travelling with staff from ETP member companies and supporting producers to meet international standards. They’ll be returning to Kenya for another ‘train the trainer’ workshop for the climate change adaptation project before Jane accompanies another of our members on visits to Kenyan producers, and Wagurah heads off to Rwanda for some strategic meetings with tea industry stakeholders there.
Ranjan, our Kolkata based Regional Manager is heading down to South India to meet up
with our local associate Vinod to support producers in that region in achieving certification. When he returns he’ll be joined in Kolkata by Diya, who previously worked for ETP in the UK. We are delighted that she liked it so much that she chose to carry on working for ETP when it was time to return home. We’re not letting Diya get too settled in Kolkata however, as she will be off to Assam shortly, supporting our training programme for producers.
Dushy, our Sri Lankan Regional Manager flew to Indonesia on Monday to provide technical support on the nursery development work which is taking place as part of smallholder improvement project there. As well as running these types of project in Sri Lanka, Dushy has worked in Indonesia before, so he has been greatly looking forward to returning and visiting the sites with Nelia, our Indonesian Regional Manager. Nelia must cover more miles on difficult terrain than anyone else in our organisation as she supports estates and smallholders across the Indonesian islands.
Its only a short trip for Dushy however, as he needs to be back in time for the various activities that we are planning around the Colombo Tea Convention at the beginning of February. I am one of the speakers and am greatly looking forward to visiting one of the agrochemical management trainings that we are running, along with ETP members attending the Convention. After that I’ll be catching up with Liz, ETP’s China advisor who will just be back from her visit agreeing the next phase of our training programme in China.
With such a busy start to 2012, we’re all greatly looking forward to all being in the same place at the same time and catching up with each other and all our corporate members at ETP’s conference at the end of May.