Dear Soma Family,

We write this to you from the foot of a young palm tree on the beach beside Kuburne Village on Karkar Island, off the coast of Papua New Guinea.

We’ve come here to visit the farm we source our PNG cacao from.

We’ve been greeted by Paul and Barbara who own the farm, Caroline and Freddie who run our guesthouse, and all the people of Kuburne.

We were met at the boat by several hundred locals who gave us a traditional greeting, first sending warriors to ask the purpose of our visit, then singing and dancing as they led us to our house. 

We have been fed (over-fed) by many cooks. We have been invited to homes, schools, and town meetings.

We have played games with children, taken tours, and listened to songs.

We spent two days on Paul and Barbara’s farm, seeing the land, meeting the labourers, learning how they work and sampling their cacao. 

Yesterday, accompanied by forty friends from the village, we hiked for twelve hours up and down an active volcano, and our photographer Julien crashed his drone in the crater. The local police were so upset when we told them that they promised to go down into the crater to retrieve it.

While we’ve been stunned by the beauty of this island and impressed by the scale of Paul and Barbara’s farm, we’ve been moved the most by meeting the people.

Paul and Barbara employ 250 men and women (in good years the number rises to 500), which means 250 families have money to buy food, pay for services, and send their children to school. 100,000 people live on Karkar Island, and at present there is no doctor.

It falls to Paul and Barbara to buy and distribute medicine to their community, help promising young people pursue an education, and settle clan disputes.

Rising cacao commodity prices have been a pain for us at Soma, but a blessing for the people of Karkar. Paul says he sees more children at school each morning, more houses with proper roofing for the rainy season, and more bicycles on the roads each day.

At Soma we strive to run a business that benefits everyone. We want our work to be a win-win-win-win-win. To know that the money we spend with Paul and Barbara goes towards medicines on shelves and children in schools, young adults learning trades and families buying solar lighting is unimaginably rewarding for us. 

We’re also aware that, ultimately, it’s your money we spend when we buy cacao from Karkar.

We hope it warms your heart each morning, as you sip on a hot mug of Karkar Island Soma Cacao, to know that across the sea there are a couple more children attending school, a woman cooking by light, a man riding to work on a bicycle, and sick people receiving medicine, all thanks to you.

If you boiled Soma down to its essence, that essence would be connection.

We connect Australians looking for healthy, uplifting, high-quality cacao with the people in the Solomon Islands, FNQ, Mexico, PNG, and Peru who can provide it.

The people of Karkar were so excited to see the name of their island on a bag of Soma. We’ve spent a week telling them about you and the work we do in Australia.

We can’t wait, over the next few weeks, to tell you all about them.

With full hearts and coconut sugar,

Rose, Alistair, and Julien, in Kuburne Village, Karkar Island