Grace Cameron, Contributor
(From left) Cynthia Williams, Donna Sicard, Elaine Williams, Cinderella Anderson, Annette Henry, Melrine Dunn, Dehand Bentley-Kelly, Andrea Taylor-Moncrieffe, Cynthia Clarke, Deborah Johnson and Charmain Wright. Seated is Yvonne Moodie. - Contributed Photos
When the Mango Valley Pride agro-processing factory opens on October 15, it will be the end of one journey and the beginning of another for a group of women, who dared to believe they could uplift themselves, better their community and serve as example to others.
In the late 1980s, they started baking muffins and cupcakes on coal stoves and stirring jams and jellies over wood fire. They brought their own pots and pans to the run-down community centre, that sometimes had no doors or electricity, and dreamt of a day when they would have the proper equipment and space to turn oranges into marmalade and breadfruit into wine.
The group of 12 women sold their muffins and cupcakes in the shops dotting the community of 10,000 people, and their line of Mango Valley Pride jams, jellies, preserves and condiments in the Rural Agricultural Development Authority shop in Kingston.
Then they hit the road. For more than two decades, the women, whose numbers have at times grown as high as 25, have wowed officials and patrons at food events across the island with scrumptious items such as honey guava cheese, otaheite apple balls and candy (sweetie) made from crystallised breadfruit swords.
Expectations
Along the way, they've picked up customers like the small Ocho Rios area hotel they supply with organic orange marmalade.
Cinderella Anderson, the unofficial group leader and one of the original dozen who pooled their 'pennies' (about $3,000 each) and their dreams in the late 1980s, can barely keep herself from spilling the beans about their expectations for the factory.
"Something big is about to happen," she promises. "I see us exporting products, and quite a good amount, into other countries."
Anderson, normally a reserved country pastor at the Shiloh Apostolic Church, can be forgiven for her enthusiasm. When the group started, very little was happening for the women in this community, located in hills bordering St Mary and St Ann and a 35-minute drive from the swanky resorts of Ocho Rios.
Low pay
While a number of area women used to embroider products for the tourist industry in Ocho Rios, they dropped out because of the low pay, she explains.
"It totally grieved me to hear the women crying and not being able to send their children to school the way they wanted to," says Anderson, who went on a mission to get funding for community projects.
They got a lucky break in the 1990s, receiving an industrial six-burner gas stove - which they still use - through the effort of Wesley Hughes, then director of the Planning Institute of Jamaica, who fell in love with their offerings. The women met Hughes at an event where they had products like banana, plantain and cassava flour, and passion-pineapple jam on display.
"It was a wonderful display and everybody wanted to know if those were on the export market," recalls Anderson.
Other developments didn't come so easily. At one point, the roof of the community centre was damaged by a storm, the lights were off, the women needed further training and members of the community needed to boost their academic skills.
Anderson said she was driven to pick up pen and paper and wrote to anyone she figured would listen. She sent letters to the HEART Trust, United Way, Sandals CEO 'Butch'Stewart and other hoteliers, the Chris Blackwell Foundation, and even appealed to, then prime minister, P.J. Patterson, for assistance to fix the bathroom and get electricity to the community centre.
Anderson remembers calling HEART every day for three months from a phone booth and making the trek to the Chris Blackwell Foundation in Oracabessa, St Mary, up to three times a week for four to five months, to get grilles for the centre.
The persistence paid off with repairs to the centre (Prime Minister Patterson's office responded in a week), and the involvement of HEART Trust, which set up an entire operation and offered programmes in basketry and skills training for jobs in the hotel industry.
Eye opener
Through it all, the women continued cooking up new products. Using the skills they learned in the HEART training and fruits and vegetables that were going to waste in their community, they developed new lines like powdered orange spice and powdered bissy, otaheite apple balls, jerk seasoning and combined fruit jams like pineapple-passion. For a while, they were also the golden girls of the Jamaica Cultural Development Com-mission's (JCDC) amateur food competition, reaping medals for their jams, jellies and preserves.
"Our eyes were opened up as to how we could use fruits to make preserves and condiments and we saw where we could earn an income from this venture," says Anderson, a justice of the peace and also coordinator of the Mango Valley community-based training centre.
For Carla Robinson, one of the early group members, it also meant they could make good use of fruits such as otaheite apples that boys in the community were using to stone pigs.
"People got tired of just eating it and it used to grieve me when apples would fall from the tree and splat open because they were so big - some could weigh up to two pounds."
Charmain Brown-Wright, who moved to Mango Valley from Kilancholly, St Mary, in the 1990s, reckons, "We're doing a good thing because there is so much value in these fruits and people don't realise that."
A one-time JAMAL volunteer, and a missionary of the Mango Valley Shiloh Apostolic Church, Brown-Wright says being part of the group has taught her various skills.
Something to fall back on
Besides food preparation, the 41-year-old mother of three is an expert at crochet and is enrolled in the housekeeper training pro-gramme run by HEART at the community centre.
"I just want to have a back-up so that if one thing doesn't work out I have something to fall back on to help my children."
For Donna Sicard, 46, being a member of the group, now called the Mango Valley Visionaries, has earned her supplementary income over the years and opened up her world. Sicard, a member from the outset, says she has relied on the money she has made from product sales to help raise her three children. Last year, she went to the Caribbean gift show in the Dutch island of Curacao and "the exposure was beautiful".
Cynthia Williams, another original member, agrees that the group has exposed her to new experiences.
A one-time clothing vendor and restaurant worker in Ocho Rios, Williams, 47, says: "This has changed my life completely. We started from nothing when nobody knew about us. Now we go places and learn to speak better and present ourselves well. And, what we don't know, we ask some of the bigger heads."
Williams adds that she's eager to see the factory up and running.
"This is not just for myself alone, but for others to come and experience what we're doing, and for the young people to see that there is something good in all of us.
"I want to go into stores and hotels and see Mango Valley Pride products and be able to tell people that is what I do. I want to reach up to the top," she adds.
Velva Lawrence, acting executive director of the New Kingston-based Local Initiative Facility for the Environment (LIFE), which provided the Mango Valley project with US$40,000 in grant funding, said the initiative has served as a useful platform for the entrepreneurs.
LIFE has also helped the group to secure an additional J$4 million plus from the Environmental Foundation of Jamaica and a small grant from the Private Sector Development Project. The agency has also provided training and networking opportunities for the women with other organisations.
Lower energy bills
As an environmental agency, LIFE was also instrumental in having the new factory equipped with solar heating and a biogas treatment facility, which will mean lower energy bills and 'greener' production.
"We expect Mango Valley to start producing and generating money by October or November," says Lawrence.
LIFE, which emerged five years ago from a United Nations Development Programme project, has worked with more than 20 community groups across the island, including Jeffrey Town, St Mary, which two years ago won the Michael Manley Award for community self-reliance.
For Cinderella Anderson, now 60, it's the end of one long journey and the beginning of another adventure. With 20 items under the Mango Valley Pride brand - and more to come - she believes the factory will help families and bolster the community.
Anderson credits her seven children and husband Morris, who used to work in the hotel sector, for supporting her.
"Sometimes when I come home, the meat is cooked and my carrot juice with ginger and lime is ready. He really, really, fix me up on that," she says.
Grace Cameron is editor-in-chief of Jamaican Eats magazine.
Wines from Mango Valley Pride.
Powdered orange spice and kola nut, also known as bissy.
