Dear Somalovers,

Last week we launched our Flores Island Ceremonial Cacao. While we haven’t received any official reviews on our website yet, word on the street (ie word from Rose’s dad) is that the cacao is a hit. We certainly love it ourselves, and we know it will be a favourite for a long time at Soma.

Along with our Flores cacao, we also launched a fundraiser to help Floresians affected by the earthquakes of a few weeks ago. In addition to the 5% of sales we’ve pledged to relief efforts, we’ve raised a little under $1300 from 33 generous members of the Soma community.

As we source cacao from more farms in more countries, we find ourselves falling in love with more people and more places around the world. It’s impossible to open our eyes to the world without seeing tragedy from time to time. It requires a certain maturity to see tragedy without losing sight of the tremendous beauty of the world: to open our hearts to joy and pain, without trying to own joy, or fix pain.

Just as sometimes the people we love come to us with broken hearts, not asking us to super-glue the pieces back together, but hoping that we will sit with them, share the pain, and wait until new life emerges from the ruins, in the same way we sometimes have to feel the pain of the world, without forcing it away or trying to remedy it.

We live in a problem-solving culture, and the great gifts we enjoy in this country come from our collective inability to turn away from problems. The fact that the poorest person in Australia has access to shelter, food, and healthcare, and the fact that so many of us wish that access were easier and readier, is nothing short of a miracle.

It can be hard to explain the beauty of some places in the world to our Australian friends, who are accustomed to looking for problems to fix. For example, when we talk about our time on Karkar Island, our friend’s eyes often glaze over as we talk about the green beauty of the land, they check their watches as we describe the beautiful singing that rises from every house at dusk, they look aggressively uninterested when we mention the vividness of the dreams we had there, and the feeling of invisible life humming all around us; but when we mention that Karkar Island has 100,000 people and no doctor to serve them, our friends’ eyes light up, they clutch their pearls and say, “oh, those poor, poor people.”

If you go to Karkar Island, you will realise that the people there are anything but poor.

The kids of Karkar Island

We think of Soma as a kind of cultural exchange: we give our customers’ money, our contacts, and the know-how of our Soma network to small cacao farmers in beautiful places around the world; in return, they give us the richness of their land, and a little of the richness of their way of life and stories.

Farmer Paul in Karkar Island told us that as cacao commodity prices rise, and he sells to premium buyers (ie Soma), he can afford to pay his staff more, so he sees more bicycles on the road, more electric lights in houses, more children in school, and more elderly people able to afford medicine. We give some of our wealth, and receive some of Karkar’s wealth in return. For money can be exchanged; wealth, like love, can only be multiplied.

We’re also mindful of our relationship with you, dear Somi. Everyone is looking, knowingly or not, for the richness of life. Business, and especially advertising, but really everything, works by offering people tastes of this richness. Alistair and I are hippies from way back, so we’re careful with the energy we share - we try to sell excellent cacao with impeccable ethics by sharing inspiring stories and generosity with our community. We hope you’ve noticed that we never rush you, we don’t resort to fear and greed, and we don’t manipulate. We know that the way we treat everyone at Soma, from our customers to staff to suppliers, becomes the Soma imprint, which attracts a certain person to us, and perpetuates itself through our relationships with those people.

Therefore, we try to avoid guilt and hand-wringing. Both are abundantly available in the world (turn on the news if you’re curious), and both give a certain burst of energy, but it’s a sticky energy, which creates dependency, not freedom. And because they are murky energies, one can hide all sorts of self-interest and self-importance inside them.

In WW2, the Japanese army occupied Flores, and put the local population to hard work to fuel their war effort. Like the maroons in Jamaica, many Floresian families escaped, and established communities in the rugged interior of the island. Our friend Septhania belongs to one of those families. Her family live to this day in a town which consists of two rows of houses along a single road on a steep ridge. If the views Septhania’s family home commanded were available in Australia, people would pay millions of dollars for them. She tells us her family are sleeping out of doors now as they ride out the aftershocks of the earthquake, cooking together at a fire, singing and telling stories. She says the rebuild is underway, and people are cheerful if a little shaken.

Us on beautiful Flores Island

We have been moved to help Septhania and her family, and other communities like theirs, to rebuild after the earthquake. If you want to join with us in helping them, any money you can spare will be deeply appreciated. We’re also aware of the floods in Nepal, and countless other tragedies that happen around the world each day. And we’ve become good at never losing sight of the beauty of the world, particularly the tender beauty that follows tragedy, and grows from it.

Flores will be fine. People will mourn and rebuild. We feel privileged to be part of that. We feel privileged to know Flores at all. We are privileged to make relationships with people who live in paradises around the world. It is one of the best parts of our work. As those relationships deepen, they become more and more personal, driven not by calculation, but by empathy. We love Flores, and that is why we want to help.

It is in that spirit that we will continue our fundraiser, plus giving 5% of the sales of our Flores cacao to NGOs, for another week.

With cinnamon and a little touch of clove,

Rose, Alistair, and the team at Soma Cacao