cuarta cosecha

In recent news: Karie is late. She is moored in San José because the landslides took out the roads, and the busses are not running to San Vito, hence not to here. Jack made it back, though. He seemed totally relaxed after such an awesome weekend with his friends in Cerro del Muerto.

Anyway...


7:00. I woke up with a start, realizing that I had overslept. This is a first.

I made it up to Faynier´s house by 8:30 or thereabouts. Belisa sent her daughter to Aurora´s to retrieve an extra basket for me. Amanda was waiting; Faynier was already down the slope. While we waited for Becky to return, Amanda asked about how the harvest works. Today was her first harvest. I described it to her: ¨You go for the red or red-yellow beans, never for the green.¨ Becky came back, I slung the basket around my waist, and we joined Faynier downhill.


The rhythm was so natural and the branches were so laden with cherries that it was easy to pick and talk at the same time. Amanda and I took parallel stands and occasionally the same trees while we talked and contemplated the social location that the CAN program has here. It seems like the others´ families do not know very much about what CAN is doing. Amanda said that her family does not always buy coffee from the Cooperative; they buy different brand of coffee from BM instead. This discussion raised a lot of doubts for me. Are we being too pretentious? Are we just not hearing the families and the program expectations and the Cooperative and our own participations right? It has been a worry of mine that I am somehow imposing myself on the community. Yesterday I had a conversation with Inez on my way home from the BM. I had just finished reading the article ¨To Hell with Good Intentions¨ and was in a very sad mood. Inez totally dispelled the entire mood of the article just with her good energy and her assurance that everyone here loves making friends with the interns, and that they are always very sad when they leave.

Sara joined us at 11AM or so and we picked for a bit longer. We broke for lunch, and afterwards we made a list of all the things we wanted to ask Karie, to help straighten out and smoothen the process for future interns. It was raining when we went back outside, and Faynier made us stop picking. We measured the amount we had picked: 4.5 cajuelas. Not bad at all.

When I went home, I found the whole family over, visiting. I had forgotten it is a national holiday, Día de la Raza. Flor had made tamales a couple days ago, and there was still some left over. Taking to Faynier earlier, during lunch, had given me the confidence to ask more questions. During lunch I had asked Faynier how old his coffee plants were; I had noticed that they are quite tall, with barely any Ojo de Pollo, and, although they grow on an unshaded slope, they seem healthier than both Roberto´s and Pollón´s trees. I wonder if he uses chemicals? When I asked him, he answered, ¨4 años.¨ I was very surprised that they were so young. He went on to discuss the climate of coffee-growing, and then told me something very important. He said that the coffee-growers in the more arid regions get a higher price for their coffee; the coffee grown in more humid regions are naturally lower quality. This makes sense, I thought, considering that coffee comes from the shade forests of Ethiopia. But the amounts he told me were staggering; in a drier region, a cafetalero could obtain $150 for a fanega, while here in Agua Buena, only $100. The implications were huge. Also (and I think Noemy was telling us about this too), the cost of transportation is much higher for the people here, because they have to take it all the way to San José, whereas the people who grow in the more arid regions are right there. Wow, I thought, no wonder so many cafetaleros cut their coffee. This market is terrible for them - and worse still in a coffee crisis! It gave me a very new perspective on exactly what CAN´s work means or could mean to these famers.

At home, I asked Flor if our family had any coffee to pick. She said no and then told me something very interesting. Nine years ago, the whole garden area and half the area of the house had been coffee. Nine years ago, they cut their coffee. When I asked why, Gení said that it was very unprofitable to keep it. Now the family sells chayote - there is a huge jungle of it in the back area of the garden, near to the cow pen. Their garden is so beautiful, so much more diverse, than it would have been with only coffee in it.

The thoughts of the discussion Amanda, Sara, and I had had were still weighing heavily on my mind. Later in the afternoon, I got into a conversation with Julieta, and I think I might have unwittingly wound up insulting her when I said that the handbook did not have enough input from the host families, even though she didn´t say I had. She answered that in each case, it is an adjustment for both the student and the host family to learn each others´ lifestyle. Each family is different and so will have different expectations. I protested and said that the part that gave me pause was the article about ´white supremacy´ and, motioning to my own arm, said, ¨No soy white supremist.¨ She very patiently explained to me that many students had been through Agua Buena, and that these many students, while they were not all the same, had given them a very good idea of the range of the students and some of the general problems that can arise. It is a very good idea for the students to review the information about social location, because they are in a different space. I answered that I just wanted to know how to respect people, without going around offending everyone. Julí mentioned something that I had read before in Chris´s Shoestring book, but that made all the difference in the world hearing. Luckily, Julí and her family are very straight-forward about such things; most families, and most Ticos in general, will not say anything when they disagree or when something insults them. Most would just like to keep everything nice and non-confrontational. It is the sort of thing that is discussed in the in-country orientation. When she realized that we had not discussed these things, she looked worried. It suddenly occurred to me that the manual itself was not meant to give us our orientation - half of it needed to correspond to our interactions with Didier. And it gave me an idea of where to go next with the program.

That was a very important conversation. I am very thankful to Julí, and I am sorry if I insulted her, even though it was an accident.