Art by Dan Sekanwagi

Green Tea Power - In Words

I grew up on a large tea estate that was the main employer of my village’s community members. We would play hide and seek in the thicket of the short shrubs that made up the farms which supported nearly the entire community! I can still smell the unmistakable aroma of freshly plucked tea leaves heaped on the wooden bed of ‘cyaraboze’, a large rickety commercial truck – also known as a ramshackle lorry back in the part of the world I grew up.

The tea plantations were regularly flat-top trimmed, a pruning procedure that optimized production. They were maintained at about a three feet tall level so the pickers would easily reach all the harvestable leaves from any side of the shrubs. That height was also our yard stick for who got to play in the thick plantations.

No matter how badly you wanted to follow bigger kids or your older siblings for that matter -- to their rendezvous in the estates, height among other things was the ultimate test; if you were not taller than the tea shrubs by at least your entire head, they would not let you in. It was a safety measure against getting lost in the plantations that covered square miles – causing unduly trouble for the older kids.

We were often pricked and bruised by the pruned branches but that would not hinder us from our escapades. I guess we took it as part of the fun, the thrill of squeezing through the narrow paths tea pickers established in the estates to ease their movement with large harvest baskets strapped on their backs. These paths were short cuts to our hideaways and meeting places which we had plenty of in the numerous zones that made up the vast estates.

There is no doubt in my mind that the fondest moments of my childhood were the adventures in the Namutamba tea estates. No wonder after all these years, I can still vividly see my childhood blossoming into adolescence and manhood but still feel so nostalgically inseparable from the tea estates.

While green tea possesses well documented powerful health benefits, to me green tea was a way of life. When others talk about the health implications of green tea, I have only songs of praise for how green tea paved my way into the person I am today.

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