Jamie’s life as a Ugandan logger
A COILTE harvesting manager, living in Ramsgrange, found himself a long way from the Irish forests when he took part in an episode of The Hardest Harvest, which brought him to Uganda.
Scottish-born Jamie Hawan (32) featured on the programme, which aired on Wednesday night. He comes from a long line of foresters, following in the footsteps of his great-grandfather, who was a logger in the Ukraine, his grandfather and father. But he took a roundabout way into the industry, working first in various office and civil service roles before going back into education and studying forestry.
He now lives in Ramsgrange with his partner Celine, her daughter Emma and his son Jason.
Jamie explained that last year RTE had contacted Coilte, looking for foresters to take part in a programme and he was invited to put his name forward along with other colleagues.
A few weeks later, RTE arrived and did some filming before eventually telling Jamie that he’d been selected.
‘I knew they were sending me to Africa but I didn’t know exactly where until closer to the time. I didn’t know anything about the set-up over there and I didn’t research it because I wanted to see it with fresh eyes. You couldn’t even google the area I was going to because it was so rural. I expected it to be less developed but I wasn’t prepared for what I saw - it was like the Dark Ages; I didn’t even see a chainsaw, it was all hand tools.’
He said that in Ireland, Coilte has various departments dealing with sales and forestry, etc but in Uganda he was basically a one-man show, cutting down the trees and selling them on out of a truck.
In addition to that, he got to experience the community policing type project that the locals partake in to counter the problem of illegal loggers. Illegal logging, mostly at night, is rife, driven by Chinese demand for timber but with local villagers providing their own, illequipped security forces, there is always the danger that they will confront an illegal logging crew that is prepared to fight back rather than accept arrest.
‘I showed up one morning in the pitch black and was told that I was going to track illegal loggers in the rainforest. You stick close to your guide when you’re out there!’
As well as all of that Jamie got the chance to interact with the family he lived with while in Uganda for three weeks and got to see, firsthand, the type of poverty that they endured.
‘ They live in a typical mud hut. There’s no electricity, no running water; the shower is a basin of water around the back of the house. It’s a different world.’
In terms of climate, temperatures hit 30 degrees daily with considerable humidity and torrential thunderstorms in the afternoons that turned the various routes along the mountain to mud and halted all movement until the area had dried.
One of the things that struck Jamie the most was the divide between the cities and developed areas, and the rural areas where the poverty was so evident. Jamie’s return home from the three weeks away coincided with Christmas shopping season and he said that going from one extreme to another was an eye opener.
‘I told the lads they were lucky I had started the Christmas shopping before going over, otherwise they would have got nothing!’ he joked.
Looking back on the trip now, Jamie said that it was incredible experience though he admitted that he didn’t think he was prepared enough for what he witnessed:‘On the day I got back, if you’d asked me would I have gone had I known, I’d have said no. But now, I appreciate that it was an amazing experience. The hardest part was having no contact with my family - they knew I’d be physically capable for it but mentally and emotionally, it was a challenge.’