Olympia couple uses their shea-butter business to build a brighter future for Togo

The nuts of the wild shea tree of West Africa produce a rich butter prized for cooking, cosmetics and healing. As a boy in Togo, Olowo-n'djo Tchala spent hours gathering them to pay for clothing and school supplies.


		SCOTT EKLUND
	Using shea butter from Togo, Olowo-n'djo Tchala and his wife produce fair-trade Alaffia lotions, creams and soaps from their home near Olympia.

Now when Tchala scoops shea nuts into his long, graceful hand, he sees an opportunity to help free Togo -- perhaps all of Africa -- from entrenched poverty.

At Steamboat Island, a rural community near Olympia, Tchala and his wife, Rose Hyde, oversee the production of fair-trade shea-butter lotions, creams and soaps, bound for retailers such as Whole Foods in Seattle.

Their bottling and distribution plant, about the size of a triple garage, sits on a grassy, tree-lined field near the modest, blue-clapboard rambler where they're raising their two young daughters. Goats loll in a small pen in a clearing, and chickens peck for bugs. A few sheep doze behind the workshop.

The bucolic setting belies the phenomenal growth of what quickly has become an international operation. In its first three years, Alaffia Sustainable Skin Care -- named for a greeting in central Togo -- has pumped an estimated $400,000 into Togo's economy.

Tchala and Hyde earmark 10 percent of sales to development projects in the tiny West African nation: furnishing schools, planting trees in deforested areas and trying to reduce a maternal death rate that claims one in 16 women -- including one of Tchala's sisters.


		MARIA MASON
	A worker at Alaffia's co-op in Togo stirs the cooked, whipped shea butter during the final stage of a 12-step process.

This summer, with help from Puget Sound-area volunteers, the small company pulled off one of its most ambitious projects -- delivering bicycles to hundreds of kids in remote areas of Togo so they can attend school.

"He's a magical guy," said Maria Mason, a Bainbridge Island volunteer who, with her teenage son Adrian, helped deliver the bikes in July. "Most people come to the U.S. and want to live the high life, where he wants to give back."

Tchala -- his full name is pronounced Olo-WAN-jo CHA-la -- is a tall man with gentle eyes, an elegant carriage and a warm manner. He has a close-cropped beard, and his batik shirt is patterned in deep greens and golds.

"What we're trying to do in a sense is a social movement," he said. "If you have visited Africa, you will see that the poverty is beyond belief. I don't think any human should have to live that way anymore -- not when we have the most resources on Earth."

Tchala is a walking example of the possible. One of eight children, he said he was raised by a mother who was orphaned in infancy and exploited for her labor. His father, he added, has 32 children by multiple wives.

Today Tchala helps support many of his relatives in Africa. It's a heavy responsibility for a young man -- and by Western standards, Tchala is quite young.

"Rose, did I just turn 30?" he asked, swiveling in his desk chair.


		MARIA MASON
	Mason rides with Nadja, an abandoned toddler whom Tchala is helping raise, as is Mason, who's donating $5 a month.

Hyde, 33, nodded without looking up from the computer, where she creates the formulations for such products as Shea Butter Blissful Baby Balm. Her honey-colored hair, bound up in two buns at the top of her head, seemed to bob its assent.

Tchala arrived in the U.S. in 1998 with a sixth-grade education and not a word of English. Five years later he had a University of California-Davis degree in organizational theory -- the study of capitalism.

He said his studies helped him understand the root causes of poverty, "so instead of coming from an angry point of view, you learn from a rational point of view."

Tchala left Togo to join Hyde, a former Peace Corps volunteer who had returned to the U.S. to further her own studies. She earned a double master's in ecology and international agricultural development.

Degrees in hand, they set about producing handmade, all-natural shea butter -- both in bulk and as finished lotions and creams -- for the growing world market. Alaffia products are sold throughout the U.S. and in Hong Kong, South Africa, Taiwan, Japan, Trinidad and elsewhere.

Shea butter was an apt choice for their venture. For centuries Togo's women have overseen the demanding, 12-step process that turns the rough, brown nuts into a silky butter used there for everything from skin salve to umbilical-cord cleanser.

"A woman in the central part of Togo sometimes can't get married unless she knows how to make shea butter," Tchala said.

Alaffia's shea-butter cooperative in Sokode, central Togo, provides good-paying jobs and monthly medical checkups to 80 workers, who are encouraged to wear their colorful native dress and speak in their traditional languages, rather than the official French handed down from the colonial era.


		MARIA MASON
	Olowo-n�djo Tchala, standing, left, and 18-year-old Adrian Mason, center, from Bainbridge Island, work with other volunteers last July to deliver used bicycles from Washington state to the children of Togo, some of whom walk up to 10 miles to school � each way.

"That's one of the hidden agendas behind the whole thing," Tchala said with a quiet smile, "because Africa has lost so much of its culture because of colonialism."

Hand-crafting shea butter is not for the faint of heart. Co-op workers shell, dry and crush the nuts into a thick paste, then add clean water and hand whip the concoction for up to three hours to separate the oils. Another round of stirring causes the oils to crystalize into shea butter, which cools into waxy, pale-gold chunks that are shipped to Steamboat Island.

There, Tchala and Hyde oversee six workers, mostly Americans from the Olympia area. The small crew liquefies the butter in heated barrels, stirs in other natural ingredients such as baobab and lemon grass, then hand-bottles the products, which retail for about $10 to $14.

Hyde, quietly efficient and serious, provides technical know-how. Tchala is the visionary and official face of Alaffia.

"Because I grew up in poverty ...," he says on a company flier, "I feel morally responsible to dedicate my life to empowering our communities in Africa."

Which brings us to the Bicycles for Education project.

For months, Tchala had mulled how to provide bikes to children in rural Togo, where they walk up to 10 miles -- each way, in some cases -- to attend school. Many stay overnight and seldom see their families.

He figured bikes would be especially helpful for girls, whose household duties further sap their time, causing 40 percent to leave school by sixth grade.

"In Togo," he said, "there's a cultural expectation that if you're female, you have to do cooking, wash dishes, do laundry. There's no time to study. We can't change the culture nor judge them, but we can work within it."

The idea idled until a fateful day two years ago, when Tchala's fair-trade sign at Bumbershoot caught Maria Mason's eye and they got to talking.

The Bainbridge woman had been casting about for a rite-of-passage project she could undertake with Adrian, who was 16 at the time -- something that would help him see the needs of the larger world beyond the waterfront home of their affluent community.

Excited by Tchala's vision, Mason asked if she and Adrian could visit the co-op in Togo and help out.

"What can we do that would really make an impact on the community?" she asked.

Tchala's ready answer: "Bicycles!"

Adrian and his mom spent the next year soliciting used bikes for the project. They posted fliers and manned tables at supermarkets; in their first four hours they got 26 pledges.

Soon volunteers from Olympia pitched in as well, helping amass close to 400 bicycles, which Tchala and Hyde heaped in their garage like a towering ball of tangled string.

In July -- two years after the bike project started, and a year after political upheaval in Togo delayed their initial travel plans -- Tchala and the Masons delivered the bicycles to children in 14 towns and villages.

It was a difficult, two-week trek, largely because of bureaucratic hurdles that kept the bikes locked in port for days.

"I grew up there," Tchala said, "so I knew it would not be easy, but I also didn't know it would be that complicated."

Eventually, they got the go-ahead and trucked the bikes to the neediest children who had applied, along with 400 pairs of eyeglasses for other recipients.

These were joyous occasions, filled with speeches and dancing as entire communities turned out to greet Tchala and his entourage. Mason said some children kissed the photos of the Washington residents who had sent bikes. Follow-up visits are planned to keep the bikes in repair.

Adrian Mason, now 18 and a freshman at Colgate University, was awed by the experience: "We take for granted so many things here," he said. "Going there and seeing how it changed so many lives -- it was one of the most amazing things I've ever done."

The bike project lives on, thanks to volunteers in Washington, Oregon and California. Tchala hopes to find a Seattle volunteer willing to collect bicycles in and around the city. He tells a reporter to be sure to thank everyone who helped.

Meanwhile, the co-op's shea butter keeps flowing, softening the world's complexion and smoothing the way for the people of Togo. If idealism can be bottled, Tchala has found a way to do it.

"He's so kind," said Mason, who hasn't met anyone quite like Tchala. "There's something about him that makes him stand out and be different. He wants to help the country. He's an amazing guy."

BUTTER UP

Alaffia Sustainable Skin Care products are available throughout the Puget Sound area, including the following Seattle stores: Madison Market, 1600 E. Madison St.; Metropolitan Market, 2320 42nd Ave. S.W.; Whole Foods, 1026 N.E. 64th St., and West Seattle Thriftway, 4201 S.W. Morgan St.

To donate bicycles, call 360-866-8500 or e-mail bikefortogo@alaffia.com.

Other information: www.alaffia.com and www.empowermentalliance.org.

P-I reporter Cecelia Goodnow can be reached at 206-448-8353 or ceceliagoodnow@seattlepi.com.

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