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16 • The Columbia Valley Pioneer November 30, 2012
Christmas Gifts?
It’s easy as 1•2•3
1. Write your Christmas gift
basket list. (Check it twice)
2. Call Jayne with your order.
SOMETHING 3. Enjoy your holidays!
Just give
FOR
me a
EVERYONE!
call,
www.itsawrapgiftbaskets.ca 250-342-3160
Super Sunday!
11 a.m. - 4 p.m.
• Beginner Nordic Ski Packages
start at $299
(in-stock product)
• Sale on select products
• Yes IceBreaker,
Arc’teryx and more!
• Come in for a treat!
250-342-2074
1045 7 Avenue, Invermere
visit crazysoles.ca
10% off
all items
Excluding monthly specials. Offer ends December 2nd.
350 Laurier, Invermere 250-342-9933
Table Top
Christmas Trees
An anonymous elf in the Columbia Valley
has provided small table sized trees, as
a fundraiser for the Christmas Bureau.
These trees are going to be available in
December at Valley Foods and
Home Hardware, as they have been for
the past several years. Very signi cant
funds raised have helped to provide
groceries for hampers not sponsored.
Thanks again Mr. Elf .
There’s a reason they’re called
“CLASSY”. Pioneer Classifieds…
N E WSP A P E R
Phone: (250) 341-6299 • Fax: (250) 341-6229 • Email: info@cv-pioneer.com
. . . ‘Kicking Horse ’
from page 15
Of the company’s 18 different
varieties of coffee now sold,
many bear locally-relevant names.
There’s Z-Wrangler, named
for local organic rancher Chris
Zehnder, who helped conceive
the company’s name. Hoodoo Jo
is named for Joe Lucas, a math
teacher at the high school who
had a noteworthy mountain bike
crash in the Hoodoos near Fairmont.
And there’s 454 Horsepower,
a name coined by Cecilia
Archer, the company’s first female
coffee roaster.
Other varieties are named
after local geographic features,
but all are bound for new points
on the map – not only as whole
roasted beans, but potentially
as ground coffee as well. That’s
an option, as long as product
quality can be maintained, said
Ms. Rosenfeld.
“We still have tremendous opportunity in Canada,
particularly Quebec – we’re going to be doing more of
a push there,” she said. “We’re going to maintain and
defend our sales in Canada, but we’re also going to do a
push into the States.”
Asked about the temptation to veer away from fair
trade coffee towards a more profitable approach, Ms.
Rosenfeld said the company has actually moved in the
opposite direction: in 2008, company went 100 per cent
By Kristian Rasmussen, Pioneer Staff
A group of generous grandmothers are combining
heart and art to send a very special Christmas
gift to Africa at the 19th annual Big Christmas
Craft Sale at the Invermere Community Hall on
November 30th and December 1st.
The Valley Go-Go Sisters are a group of 40
local grandmothers selling handcrafted African
AIDS Angel dolls. All proceeds from the sale of the
angels raise money for the Stephen Lewis Foundation’s
initiative to help African grandmothers care
for children orphaned by AIDS.
“Many of the grandmothers in Africa are raising
their own grandchildren because there is a whole
generation that has been lost because of AIDS,” said
Connie Watson of the Valley Go-Go Sisters. “Often
times they are raising other orphan children who
have nobody to look after them.”
The Go-Go Sisters take their name from the
Zulu word for Grandmother ‘gogo’, and are one of
KICKING BACK - Kicking Horse Coffee CEO Elana Rosenfeld still holds the reins of
her company. Despite selling a controlling interest to U.S. equity firm Branch Brook,
the local company plans to stay firmly rooted in Invermere.
Photo by Stephanie Van De Kemp / www.stephvandekemp.com
fair trade and has never looked back. Despite a slightly
more expensive product, retailers embraced the change.
“We had a lot of naysayers — our brokers and people
in the coffee industry said ‘You’re not going to be able
to sustain that, you won’t be able to get supply,’” said
Ms. Rosenfeld. “We source our beans from all over the
world, and we’ve dealt with the same brokers, the same
growers, and the same grow-ops for many, many years.”
It’s that spirit that should keep Invermere’s most famous
business kicking for a long time to come.
Grandmas get crafty for Africa
250 different grandmother groups across Canada
raising money for AIDS-based initiatives in Africa.
Collectively, the grandmother groups have raised
$16.5 million since 2006, Ms. Watson added.
“We put an African name on each angel and
we tell you what it means in English,” said Wendy
Drezet of the Valley Go-Go Sisters. “Each angel gets
named after a child who has died of AIDS because
lots of children are born HIV positive.”
The dolls cost $7 and come in dozens of creative
colour combos. The African AIDS Angels began as
a charity item in 2000 when a group of Canadian
women travelled to South Africa to attend an International
AIDS Conference. Witnessing derelict poverty
and the effects of the human immunodeficiency
virus (HIV), the women decided to lend a hand by
designing dolls to sell in Canada for donations.
“The first year I remember that people were so
touched to look at a tag and say, ‘Oh my goodness,
this is the name of an African child,’” Ms. Drezet
added. “It really touches your heart strings.”