Cabo Verde Photos

This embedded slideshow is the best way I know to share all of the photos from my recent travel course in Cape Verde. This is captured from my Fogo 2024 album on Flickr, which is another way to view the same images and to capture them individually (with attribution, please). To view below, simply click < or > and click on the ... at the bottom to expand text. 

As those who know about my teaching are aware, I use coffee as a way to learn more about geography and geography as a way to learn about coffee. As I mentioned to a friend recently, coffee is the wedge -- we are always going to learn about a lot of things when we study it as geographers!

Background: In January 2024, I was delighted to travel to Cape Verde to co-lead my 16th international travel course and my first one since going to Costa Rica in January 2020 just before the world closed. I  always use the term "co-lead" even though I have been the academic instructor of record for all of these journeys. For most of my courses in Central America, I have relied on the expert guidance of Matagalpa Tours. 

For this visit to Cape Verde, I worked closely with experts on my own campus before, during, and after the travel -- just as I had done for the sustainability tour I led there in 2006. This time my colleagues at BSU's Pedro Pires Institute for Cape Verean Studies developed this program with me over the past five years, introducing me to some of the people we were to meet on the journey.

For all of these classes, we have also relied heavily on our Office of Study Abroad to promote the courses, organize the travel, and provide assistance from home during travel. The success of these courses really do depend on many collaborators, especially those who welcome us to their home communities where group travel may not yet be commonplace. 

During the course, I gave public lectures about the geography of coffee to audiences that included our own BSU students, local high school students, local dignitaries, the general public, and some experts who are themselves involved in coffee or coffee research. The idea was to provide some. context for a global industry that many in the audience already understood from an intimate, local level. Slides from these presentations are provided on the Café no Fogo post on my Coffee Maven blog, along with materials presented by Carolyn King, a recent BSU graduate who has done remarkable work on connections between Cape Verde and Cape Cod.

This led to exactly the kinds of exchanges of insights that I was hoping to have, and prepares us for further collaboration in the future. The constraints of our academic calendar caused us to take this trip during a relatively quiet time of the year for local coffee activities; I look forward to returning when the harvest and processing are more active.

Lagniappe 

I have more to say about the background and significance of this journey in a draft article I have written for the Pedro Pires Institute newsletter.