Edited to add: I´ve attached some pictures now, primarily showing our trip to the coffee finca. CJ took many of them. There is also one of school on here, as well as a couple of us at lunch at the ¨nachos as big as your head¨restaurant in Antigua.
Funny CJ story: The other day, CJ was reading one of the little house books and came to a chapter called ¨Horse Thieves¨ and she said ¨Ooooo... I bet some horses are going to steal something!¨
CJ and I arrived in Antigua on Friday night. The shuttle situation seems to have grown more complex in the past couple of weeks, or we were just really luckily in our first couple of experiences with the shtuttle. They seem to have started the thing where they stop in the middle of nowhere and make people switch from one shuttle to another and rearrange people based on destiation. It really wouldn{t be that big of a deal, but it always seems to be a half hour process sitting in the gas station parking lot or on the side of the highway in the middle of nowhere, more or less. Anyway, we finally made it to Antigua, found our hotel, and checked in. Since wed booked on Expedia this time, the checkin was very quick. Our room this time was much different than last time, and each had pros and cons. There was kind of a hallway in our room this time between the bedroom area and the bathroom, which made for a nice place to keep bags, and the bathroom this time was huge, very dissimilar to the one last time which was absolutely tiny. The room had a fireplace, and it smelled of wood smoke though there werent any materials for budiling a fire. Perhaps we could have asked at the desk, but we never actually got around to it.
After we checked in, we went immediately to the Mexican restuarant for dinner and had the delicious vegggie tacos. Theyre kind of like fajitas, with just grilled veggies on a slightly crispy torilla and you get four small ones along with rice and beans. Its excellent.
After that, we got back to the room and CJ had reading and writing to do because she literally spent the entire four hour shuttle ride from Xela to Antigua staring at the people in the seat in front of her. After she finished, we went to bed.
We got up relatively early on Saturday so that we could make it to the coffee tour on time. We ate breakfast in the hotel cafe area and then headed down the central plaza to catch a taxi to San Miguel Escobar, the nearby village where we were meeting the coffee tour people. We arrived, and were about ten minutes early, so we sat on the steps of the church in the square and watched seemigly most of the kids from the village practice a dance routine to some bad American top 40 song. We were later told that there was a fair this weekend, so Im guessing that it had something to do with that.
Pretty soon, Regina, our guide showed up with her dog, and we met up with Daniel, one of the coffee farmers from the cooperative and one of his nine kids. Regina was the translator, and a volunteer for the cooperative. She is actually from Germany and speaks German, English and Spanish fluently.
She and Daniel (and the boy and the dog) walked us up the side of the volcano (called something like Vocan Agua) to the coffee field. It was pretty far up the mountain, and a reasonably long walk up. We stopped along the way briefly to see the view of Antigua down below, and when we passed a collection of men from the village who were working together to make a new road through the fields because the last one had been destroyed in a recent mudslide.
When we got up into the fields, we got to see the coffee trees, and see a few coffee berries that had ripened early (like lots of plants, even though the coffee wont be ready for harvest until like november, it still has a few ripe berries here and there at other times in the year). While we wer there, Daniel (and Regina) explained the history of the cooperative. Apparently, a man from Wisconsin had come a few years ago (6 I believe) and worked with a farmer from the village named Felix and helped him go from simply growing his cofee, picking it, and selling it to the processing plant in the area owned by some major company to going through the entire process himself so that its ready to exported and sold either as raw beans ready to be roasted and used or as already roasted coffe. I guess some small coffee shops in the states and other place will order the beans not yet roasted and then roast them in their own roasters, and they also sell to other people and organizations who want the preroasted coffee beans.
The fields were very interesting (though absolutely full of mosquitos- I got at least 9 bites, which will of course last until September at least) and it was fascinating ot hear about the beginnings of the cooperative. After the first year when Felix and the guy from Wisconsin (whose name I don{t recall) first started doing the coffee processing it has grown from just one farmer to now 18. For a while, many of the other famers in the area were hesistant to join because in the fairly recent past there had been some other organization that came and got them all to sign on to grow these zuccini because they said they could get paid a lot, but after they put a bunch of money into growing the zuccini and harvested it, the people dropped down the price and told them that instead of buying the zuccini for 9q per pound it was only going to be about 1.5q so the farmers ended up losing like 30000 q which obviously they could not really afford. So they were hesitant to trust the wisconsin guy, but Felix was a good friend of theirs and one of their neighbors and he insisted that this guy was honest, so each year a few more joined up and now insted of selling the raw coffee for next to nothing, they are able to sell it for like $8 per pound through processing and exporting it themselves. Theyve used mircoloans to build up their business, and also to branch out. The guy from wisconin and the rest of the organization gives training about how they can diversify what theyre doing, so theyre growing different kinds of trees to use for the shade trees for the coffee instead of just using this one same kind of fastgrowing tree, theyre using avocado trees and citrus trees and macadamia nut trees and other trees that can be useful to them as side businesses. For example, some of the women in the village have started a natural cosmetics company using the avocado oil and macademia nut oil that they get from the trees planted as shade trees for the coffee, and they also sell the nuts and fruits as other products. Theyve been able to buy more land, and horses so that they don{t have to carry the 150 pound bags of coffee down the volcano on their backs any more, and theyre starting to do projects for the community. For example, they are working on building a secondary school for their village, because right now the kids who are above about 8 have to just study on a cement platfrom with a tarp over it in the town square, which as you can imagine isnt the best situation. So they{re working on very slowly budilng a secondary school. The kids in these families (and Daniel alone has like 9) are able to stay in school much longer, too because they dont need to go work to make money for the family to survive.
After we saw the fields and learned about the process of growing the coffee trees, the different type of plants and the organization, we went back towards the town. We saw the site where theyll be building the school, and we went to Daniels house. His house, like a lot of houses in rural Guatemala I think, was much like a little compound. There is a fence around the outside, and inside there are different buildings and a courtyard area in the middle with animals and various other things. Daniel had two horses, which he had gotten when he started to make money in his coffee business. He bought one which no one knew was pregnant and then got a second horse out of the deal when it ended up being pregnant. He had chickens, two dogs, and probably some other various animals. One of his daughters was selling vegetables from a table set up in the doorway of the house.
Daniel showed us the cement platform where he dries the coffee beans, and then the bicycle powered machine where they remove the outside skin thing from the coffee beans. He says that he kids love to ride it, though for the farmers its work. CJ got to do it with a handful of beans. After wed seen that whole process, we went into the kitchen room of their house and his wife showed us the way that they roast the coffee beans on a big, flat metal plate, probably the same kind used for cooking torillas, by just laying them over the fire and turning them continuously with a wooden spoon. The coffee beans would make a popping sound while they cooked, and Regina said that one pop means its a very light roast, two is a medium roast, three is a dark roast and if oil starts coming out, its espresso. After the roasted the coffee (and cj and I each had a chance to stir it) she put it onto the stone that they use for crushing the corn for tortillas, and she used the rolling stone device to grind the beans. Cj and I got to try that, as well. It was very, very smoky in there and cj and my eyes were watering. After she did that, she put the grounds into a pot of recently boiling water, and let it sit for a few mintues, and then served the cofee. It tasted very different than any coffee Ive ever had before, though I could not describe how. Partially its because it had the flavor of being cooked over a wood fire, and Im sure the fact that it was roasted about 10 minutes before we drank it was a factor, as well. We also got a pound of coffee to take home with us.
After we had our coffee and got some to take home with us, a friend of Daniels drove us back into Antigua. We read in the room for a big, and then went to dinner at the Mexican restaurant and to browse in the artisan market.
Afterwards, we came back to the hotel, read, and went to bed.
This morning we slept in some, got up, had the breakfast at the hotel, and then took showers and packed up the room. We officially checked out around 11:45 and then went over to the place with the giant plates of nachos for a light lunch since CJ cant eat much before riding on the bus. We tried to go to the atm after that, but they were both broken, so we just came back to the hotel and were hanging out waiting for the shuttle, though really Im working on this and cj is making a series of ridiculous problems by stealing, lying, being rude, etc. When we get home, CJ will be going directly to bed which she wont like. Hopefully Ill get to read for a while, and then were on to our final week of classes!
Tomorrow afternoon Ill try to update a bit and add pictures to this post (there is no usb connection here) and we have to start getting ready for our departure from xela, sometime on Friday.
