Building Robertsport Community Works in 2013

The Mama Liberia Sewing Co-op

Happy New Year to our supporters, partners and friends. This year, 2013, will see Robertsport Community Works continue to strengthen its projects and programs and advance our work creating conservation and tourism-based jobs in the community.

The Robertsport Community Campsite continues to be in business, although there's new competition in the Robertsport accommodation market with our friends' place, Kwepunha Retreat. Now that camping is a choice rather than the only beachside option in Robertsport, it's only natural that people would want a little bit more comfort!

The Mama Liberia Sewing Co-op is starting to make gorgeous handsewn lapa duvet covers in addition to their world-famous beach bags. We're making product samples now and hope to have them on-sale soon.

And I'm happy to announce that our fund-rasising arm, The African T-Shirt Company, is back in business. Buy t-shirts online if you can't get them from our man in Monrovia.

That, and we continue to support and help to guide the efforts of our partners programming beach cleanup, water safety, lifeguard trainings, surf mentoring and more.

It's going to be a great year.

The Cassava Beach trees

As of last Saturday, you are asked to pay $5.00 to sit under this almond tree and two others that border Cassava Beach. But only if you sit under it for the whole day. I saw a group of bikini and board-short clad visitors sleeping under the tree, but as they were asleep could not ask them whether the mysterious and well-anchored sign had been enforced. If it had, whether it had been enforced with cheerful hospitality. I wonder.

For the last few weeks, we've been seeing signs of life at Cassava Beach. The road, an overgrown path crowded high with elephant grass, was cleared. Areas around the trees were burned and small grasses now grow between the char. There is a wonderful little umbrella thatch on the sand that I'd love to copy for our campsite, and even a little changing area shelter made of bamboo. All wonderful and thoughtful. But I wonder how they decided to charge people who sit under the tree--and how that will work for them. There are quite a few trees on the beach in Robertsport--one of my favorite is the less-photographed giant cotton tree that borders Cassava Beach.

To me, the remarkable thing about this sign is that it's on a tree. At the Robertsport Community Campsite, we encourage our day guests and picnickers to hang out at the shade trees and hammocks next door. Our friend Aaron, who we're always giving our watermelon seeds to, runs a picnic site there. It works well. He makes a little money for helping out with tables and chairs and keeping the place clean. Our campsite guests get their peace and quiet. Everyone shares the pit latrine (or sneaks up to Nana's Lodge--we don't ask).

I've thought about it, and I'm happy in both cases to encourage people in Robertsport to charge people for services. I coached Aaron on how organize the picnic in a way people would pay him for it. Nate and I have worked closely with Wallace and T-Boy, who now work full-time at the campsite, on how to cheerfully request a $5 overnight campsite fee. All three men (two of them young--Wallace is a retired police chief and has the relaxed energy of someone at least 70 in my culture; a story about him later) collect a reasonable income from their mostly-weekend work.

I think the guy at Cassava Beach might have a hard time though, and not because people don't value the work he's put in. Paying for a person-to-person service seems fair and reasonable in West Africa--the people in Robertsport are happy to lend a hand no matter who's visiting. I think Cassava Beach's attempt to get in on the action would do best if if they focused on being there as "security" for the car or actively doing something. Anything! But asking me to pay to sit under a tree and I balk: trees are nature, part of our makeup, for relaxing. No one--not any one--should have to *pay* to sit under them. Looking at that sign makes me oddly offended.

This is either a sign of the industriousness of the people of Robertsport or the kind of impact all this dry season's visitors are having on people in Robertsport. If it's both, that could be good news. But on principle, I'm not paying $5 to sit under that tree.

January 2010 budget update

Robertsport Community Campsite
Income
Campsite fees and tent rental $150

We'll be disaggregating campsite fees and tent rental next month, just to keep things clear.

Expenditure
2 campsite IDs for campsite staff $10
2 branded and silk-screened T-shirts for campsite staff $10
3 kerosene lanterns $10
Kerosene for the lanterns $9
Campsite staff salaries $120

Sub-total $30

Women's Sewing Co-op
Income
10% from sale of hand bags $8
10% from sale of beach bags and yoga mat bags $22.50

Expenditure
Co-op bag tags $6

Sub-total $24.50

Project Summary
Robertsport Community Campsite $30.00
Women's Sewing Co-op $24.50

Budget Summary
Community Fund as of December 2009 -$509
Community Fund as of January 2010 -$454.50

Robertsport Community Campsite in the NYT Travel Section!

Photos courtesy of Sean Brody and the New York Times.

Last Sunday, the Robertsport Community Campsite made the Travel Section of the New York Times. The article, written by 'The House of Sugar Beach' author and NYT correspondent Helene Cooper, focuses on the nascent tourism industry in Robertsport and the growth of local surfing by following the life of Benjamin McCrumuda, who has also recently been profiled in Surfers' Journal. Ben, who usually stands in Alfred's shadow, is going to be chuffed to get copies of these this weekend, that's for sure. There's also a shout-out to RCW Board of Directors member Magnus Wolfe Murray, whose expertise and involvement you'll be hearing about more this year.
I'll let you check out the article, with a few caveats. The waves are not actually 20 feet, you can't surf from Shipwrecks to the campsite cotton tree, and Benjamin remains a fisherman and a surfer. Enjoy!

We haven't forgotten about our December 2009 budget update

We're not three weeks late on the December 2009 budget update. Well, we are--but we can't do anything about it. Since Alfred Lomax became Robertsport Community Campsite Manager in November 2009, he's been collecting and keeping track of campsite funds in a notebook dedicated for this purpose. He's also been keeping the funds he collects with the pastor who lives next door.

Verifying this for the months of December 2009 and early January 2010 is difficult because, since New Years, Alfred has been in Monrovia and upcountry tending to family affairs. He doesn't have a phone and no one in Robertsport, including his mother, knows when he'll be back. My frustration at not being able to locate him for our bookkeeping purposes was supplanted by the realization that him going AWOL meant we had to come up with another way to manage the campsite--fast.

Thanks to all of our supporters from the Liberian, UN and NGO communities, the campsite--as we'd like to show you in our upcoming December 2009 budget update--did well over the holiday season. We were able to widen the project's impact in the community and the quality of campsite service by hiring two full-time campsite staff working in day and night shifts. More about them and their work in a future post.

We hope Alfred returns to Robertsport so we can post the December 2009 budget update before January finishes.

November 2009 project and budget update

To all you faithful followers of these updates, we've changed a few things that you might find interesting. I've explained them for each of the applicable projects. Also, it looks like we might have some grant money coming in over the next few months. We'll update you on this very exciting news!

Robertsport Community Campsite
We've seen enough sustained income from the campsite that we wanted to reward the work that local surfers Alfred Lomax and Benjamin McCrumuda have been contributing the project.

Alfred Lomax is now the official Manager, responsible for setting up hammocks, tents and lanterns, keeping the pit latrine freshly ashed (to keep the smell and bugs down), welcoming guests and collecting campsite fees. Those of you who know Alfred personally know that he's a hospitality natural, and it will be no surprise that he's doing an excellent job. Alfred gets a $2 commission from each $5 camping fee, so that's why the numbers might look a little different this month.

Benjamin McCrumada is the campsite's Groundskeeper, responsible for building small benches, upkeep on the thatch around the latrine and shower area, and keeping paths and the parking lot brushed of bush grasses. He's paid a monthly salary of $15 for this--about the equivalent of the piecemeal work he was getting to do the same jobs, but now a steady a reliable source of income for him and his family.

Thanks to the magnanimous generosity of RCW Board Member Magnus Wolfe Murray, we've been renting his small ($10/night) and large ($15/night) tents to help raise funds for the campsite and the Community Fund, which provides the seed money for our microenterprise projects. As you'll see, now that it's dry season and thanks to the Nana's Lodge Sports Festival and Family Fun Weekend, we've had a good month.

Expenditures
Ben's salary: $15
Paying security one weekend because management didn't collect fees from the campers (it won't happen again): $60

Income
Campsite fees: $72
Tent rental: $75

Sub-total: $72

Community Beach Cleanup
Expenditure
New gloves for community members (30 pair): -$40
Sub-total: -$40

Women's Sewing Cooperative and The African T-Shirt Company
The Women's Sewing Cooperative did a good business going into the Christmas season, selling bags online through The African T-Shirt Company and at the US Embassy's Christmas Craft Fair. To make sure we had enough in stock, we expanded the Coop to 12 young women, diversified our product line to include yoga mat bags ($15) and hand bags ($10), and made some strategic scaleup and management decisions I'll blog about later. Based on good feedback from the bags, we've raised the price of the beach bags to $15. Because of the increased revenue and the new setup, we raised the amount of income coming in from 5% of profits to 10% -- an investment that will help make the project more sustainable. More about this in a future blog.

Income from Women's Sewing Coop bag sales: $48
Entry fee to sell Coop products at the Craft Fair: -$10
Transport and $10/day stipend for Bendu to come to Monrovia and sell at the Craft Fair: -$30

Our fundraising arm, The African T-Shirt Company, sells t-shirts--most of which we design ourselves, some of which we sell for friends. Three of our t-shirts fundraise directly to project areas:

Surf Liberia: These profits from these shirts goes to the Surf Liberia Scholarship Fund. In addition to paying half the school fees for our sponsored local surfers (they earn the other half by working on or running microenterprise projects), we also mentor them personally and professionally, helping them create short-term and long-term goals both for their surfing and their larger futures.

We held the 1st Annual Surf Liberia Contest this month and gave away
Income for Surf Liberia project from shirt sales and surf contest: $189
Expenditure for Surf Liberia t-shirts for local surfers in the contest: -$48
Travel and $10/day stipend for Solomon to sell Surf Liberia contest shirts in Robertsport that weekend: -$35


Cotton Tree: The tree that wraps around the front and side of this shirt is the ancient cotton tree on the Robertsport Community Campsite -- the historic tree that the boat carrying first President of Liberia Joseph Jenkins Roberts to Liberia was tied to. All profits from this shirt support our environmental programs--projects like beach cleanup and the community eco-walks in the surrounding rainforest.
Income for conservation projects: $45


African Women = Power: These shirts fundraise for gender-based violence programs in Liberia run by the American Refugee Comittee. All profits go to safehouses across the country where women and girl survivors of rape receive medical, legal, justice and psychological services. More on this in a future post.
Income for the ARC's safehouses for women and girl survivors: $36

Sub-total: $169 + $36 for the ARC


Project Summary
Robertsport Community Campsite: $72
Community Beach Cleanup: -$40
Women's Sewing Coop and African T-Shirt Company: $169
Total: $201

Budget Summary
Community Fund as of October 2009: -$711
Community Fund as of November 2009: -$510

Thanks to everyone for your support, suggestions and for helping us make this work.

Running the Robertsport Community Campsite

Photo courtesy of Jana Videira.

For the last five months, Nate and I have driven to Robertsport every weekend, set up our campsite, hired local security, brought out hammocks and kerosene lanterns, made sure the toilet thatch was defending modesty, and readied Robertsport Community Campsite for potential guests. We stayed there the whole weekend, so it was also an investment in our own comfort, but gradually the packing and unpacking of extra tents and the scent of kerosene in the trunk made us start thinking. We definitely needed someone to run the campsite.

Over the same five months, we've seen local surfer (and world famous!) Alfred Lomax smile and snap to attention whenever he's heard of a new guest visiting Robertsport. We've seen him introduce himself politely, ask tons of questions, invite strangers to stay at his house, organize his mother or his fiancee to cook for them, give them surf lessons, entrust them with his surf boards, and generally encourage visitors to feel welcome, safe and appreciated. Clearly, it was an obvious choice.

Last weekend we sat down with Alfred in a grove of hammocks and offered him the job. He was thrilled, especially since we hired his best friend and fellow surfer Benjamin McCrumuda, to be the groundskeeper. Ben has been making 'African benches' for a few weeks now -- uncomfortable looking wooden benches made from tree trunks and bamboo poles that are actually quite nice to sit on, in a therapeutic sort of way -- so we were really just formalizing his position. Plus, it's good to support them two of them: they do everything together and are respected young members of the community.

We've trained Alfred on how to make receipts and now he's officially in charge. We had a Peace Corps guest last week and a couple of friends stay over the weekend. Things are going well.

Community Member Profile: Benjamin McCroumada

As we involve more and more people in the projects of Robertsport Community Works, we will be introducing new team members to our online readership.

Benjamin McCroumada, our contractor/groundskeeper, has been instrumental to the preparation of the RCW campground. Liberia is an incredibly fertile country where untended plots of land thicken to the point of impassibility within a few months. In late May the campsite was overgrown, the shelter surrounding the latrine had vanished and there was a large hole produced by illegal sandmining immediately in front of the social area.

Benjamin has organized a small group of men from the uptown community and worked to better the campsite on a week by week basis. As a result of his labors we now have considerably fewer "parasite trees" (something akin to the strangler fig) and more space for camping. Visitors can walk around the entire base of the cotton tree and move about at night without fearing a sand trap.

Benjamin is a lifetime resident of Robertsport, though he spent ten years deep in the interior of the country, when Liberia's civil war rendered Robertsport unlivable. It was in his grandfather's village, named "Camp Four" where Benjamin learned to make traditional, "country" shelters with bush materials and where he learned how to farm and hunt.

He lives with his father and his four year old son, who he supports with his labors for RCW and as the net dispenser of a fishing team--a position of importance second only to the boat captain. While Benjamin loves the ocean and enjoys fishing, weeks can go by when the ocean is too rough for their hand-made dugout canoe and weeks and even months can pass when the fish supply seems to dwindle, sorely impacting the Uptown community's bottom line. And while Benjamin enjoys rough sees as one of the more talented surfers in Robertsport, he is grateful to have employment that does not depend on the weather.

While Benjamin will continue to work as our dependable contractor and groundskeeper, we look forward to leveraging his knowledge of the forest on our upcoming walking tours of the rainforest and surrounding area.

Signs for the campsite

When we had our first meeting with the community, we talked about ways to make the campsite more official. People have been camping and picnicking under the giant cotton tree for years, but now that the community was going to start caring for and directly benefiting from visitors, we needed to show that things were a little different. Since no one lives full-time at the site, we decided on three signs and drafted the text for them there and then.

The first sign, above, marks the turn for the campsite from the road down to Nana's Lodge. The second, below, is to remind visitors not to throw their garbage in the toilet and to keep things clean. Garbage attracts flies, and since we're adding ash, leaves and sand to the toilet on a regular basis, the wood base and thatch of the toilet is pretty fly-free.

The young boy in the photo is Claudius, an Uptown local who kept me company while I painted the campsite rules sign, helping me amend the text when I ran out of space and carry the sign under the tarpaulin when it started to rain. When I dripped white paint between the lines, he tore off the outer husk of a ripe coconut, dampened it with water collecting on a leaf and made me an effective paint eraser. It's his arm in the Robertsport Community Campsite sign above. He's 12 and I invited him to start talking to young people in the community about ways Robertsport Community Works can support their needs. It would be great to have a rotating youth member on the Community Board.

The welcome sign was a challenge, as the smallest brushes they sell at hardware stores here were clearly too big for all the information we wanted to include. I used our camping kitchen knife to pare off half the bristles. Benjamin, who made the thatch around our toilet, tied the cuttings to a stick with some twine he found lying around and made me a smaller paintbrush. Without him, we would not have been able to fit the campsite@robertsportcommunityworks.org email on the sign.

As I was painting, it was fun to discuss the text and the signs' purpose with everyone who passed. At one point, I had a crowd of about five people debating how we'd fit the rest of the welcome text on the shrinking real estate of blue. As you can see, we managed well.

The future Robertsport Community Campsite

One of our first projects involves organizing and formalizing the use of the land around the ancient cotton tree into an eco-friendly campsite. We're talking composting toilets, a sheltered cooking area and a compost heap, a freshwater camping shower, plus strategically positioned hammocks,a designated parking site and an environmentally friendly way to reuse or recycle the waste generated by our campers.

After consulting with campers and the community, we've decided to charge 5 USD per person per night, which will go to campsite maintenance and the Community Fund. Campsite maintenance means first building and then sustaining the amenities listed above -- small comforts which will hopefully encourage people to support the community and stay at the campsite, instead of driving a little further down the beach. The Community Fund will support micro-enterprise and other projects backed by Robertsport Community Works, which you'll be hearing more about in future posts.

To establish and communicate about the campsite's new policies, we're painting three signs. The smaller one, which you see here in its in-progress version, will be placed near the thatch that surrounds our pit toilet and read, "Keep our toilet clean. No garbage, please." The second small one will say, "Welcome to Robertsport Community Campsite." The large sign will welcome people, ask them not to litter, point towards the toilets, explain the fee, announce who to call for security, and also include a disclaimer of some sort absolving us of responsibility should a coconut fall on someone's head, etc. The blackboard side will list the organization's finances, which we'll also post monthly on this blog, as well as any announcements we might want to communicate.

At the moment, the payment system involves us collecting cash and a receipt book. Eventually, the security staff will be trained to issue receipts and collect funds, which they'll give to the RCW treasurer and then to us to put in the RCW account. We'll set up a PayPal account to facilitate this process as well.

We're all about bringing together best practices from like-minded organizations around the world and making them happen in Robertsport, so please post suggestions and comments freely. We hope to see you soon at the Robertsport Community Campsite!