The Fantastical Land of Oaxaca

Favio Martinez, my new favorite artist, and a taste of the fantastic!

In the beautiful state of Oaxaca in mainland Mexico lives an orator who tells tales of the magic and folklore in his native land. His name is Salvador but his friends call him Polo and we had the pleasure of being his guests for some days. With only one night in his company the distinction between reality and fantasy becomes blurred and you find yourself questioning why the world hasn’t ever looked so colorful until now. Why had you never believed in the ancient giants of both Biblical and Mayan traditions? The same ones Joshua and Caleb had never feared when investigating the promised lands; the same ones reported to the crown of Spain by one Bartolome de las Casas who had discovered their giant skull and bones in a Mayan pyramid; the same ones reported by Buffalo Bill when he discovered bones of a similar size in Wyoming and heard Native American accounts of an earlier human race, three time larger in size, who could run alongside herds of buffalo picking them up and ripping their bodies apart? The legends in Oaxaca support those heard and usually ignored from more familiar traditions, but here, there are also legends peculiar in themselves, of a nature different from all others in the world. Only I hesitate to call them legends, when Polo is there in front of me speaking of them as they took on a reality in his own life.

Polo’s childhood was spent in a small coastal town in Oaxaca among a people whose superstitions were better described as deep convictions based on real life-experiences. There were legends of a beautiful young woman, named Matlasihua, who lived in the forest and would lure men to come to her in the trees for a short while. When these men returned back to town, after what felt like only a half hour, life had actually moved forward twenty years without them. One elderly woman, a widow in town, told Polo about a time when her two sons answered the door and greeted a stranger who told them he was their father. They dismissed the man, who was their own age and wearing very old style clothes, as a lunatic. But he begged and pleaded to be allowed to see their mother. When this woman approached the door and saw the man in front of her, she immediately identified him as her husband, who she and everyone else had thought had been eaten by a Jaguar in the forest twenty years before. You could call it a native folklore supported by the elders in town as an effort to keep tradition alive in the newer generations, but that didn’t change the reality of Polo’s fear whenever he went exploring in the forest.

On one such excursion, hours deep into the forest, Polo and his father had discovered giant river-shrimps the size of lobsters. They became fisherman and sold the shrimps to all the nearby towns and made a small fortune off of them. But catching them was not a particularly easy phenomenon. Polo had to first learn to ride a bike that his dad had bought particularly for the purpose of getting to and from the river. Then he had to learn how to swim. Then he had to learn to hunt under water using a spear gun. When his son showed himself to be worthy by acquiring these new skills, his father bought him an army knife to accompany him on his work at the river. Polo was by himself one day, catching river shrimps. He had the spear gun in his hands, a mask on his face, and the army knife strapped to his thigh, and he waited patiently among the brush under the water. He had become an expert free diver and could hold his breath for five minutes at a time. Suddenly, light seemed to retreat and all he saw was a black darkness. Not the distant kind of darkness that seems to have no end, but one in the forefront, that seemed to have a texture and a physical form. The color of this form was darkness, and it moved across his limited field of vision. He waited without moving until suddenly he felt the pressure of something wrapping around his limbs. He had not known that this river was home to a giant black river-snake called Tincuatli in the Zapotec tongue, a rare Mexican species similar to a python. His only encounter with this snake before was in the stories told to him by the old people of his village.

Polo kicked and twisted and swam to the surface for air, only to be pulled down again. He couldn’t quite get at the knife on his thigh but wasn’t sure if would want to use it either. He couldn’t tell where this snake began and where it ended. What fangs did it have and would his end come more quickly if the snake suddenly felt compelled to use them. But he decided in a sudden realization that without air he would drown, that he wished to die in his own world and not the river where everything seemed so strange, where everything could move so much faster and efficient than himself. He moved and jerked and slowly made his hand find its way to his army knife and this patience was the only thing that saved him, bought him time until he could slash his way free from the tightening grasp of the snake around him limbs. He began frantically stabbing at the black flesh that wrapped around him while the snake began to uncoil, writhing in pain. He crawled himself out of the bloody water to shore. He had lost his spear gun and his knife in the struggle. He looked down the river and saw only blood and the black snake moving away from the danger that he had become. He road his bike home as fast as he could. His dad never doubted the story but bought him a gun instead. If it should ever occur again, his son would be better prepared to defend himself.

Listening to Polo as he shares these stories I am more entertained than I ever had been. I am alive in the story. I feel the power in words and memories and think nothing about movies or any other cheaper form of entertainment. I have no other desire sitting there than to dive deep into the fantasy of his world. But this is my world too. San Diego, California is not so far away from Oaxaca, Mexico. So what is it about this place that makes life so much more mysterious? I remembered that once California belonged to Mexico; once we had Native Americans who roamed the land and called it their own, and that they had legends of their own and were attuned to the mystery of the land. When was it that we became absolved from the mysterious? When was our attitude, so set against mystery, adopted and is there a way to go back? Or has the scientific method and the opinions of learned men so destroyed our ability to wonder that there is no going back?

The “legend” and “myth” taught in our humanities departments presume disbelief. If they were real beliefs at one time they are now “superstitions,” if they were fantastical they are assumed to be fiction and their purpose for our mere amusement. We study them and try and understand but with closed hearts, denying ourselves the power that they could have in life. But here in Oaxaca it seems that truth and falsehood are both apart of reality, inasmuch as they exist in our minds. I suggest that what we deem myth in our universities is actually more real than the dull facts of our textbooks. Even that which history says is real can have no reality for you if it holds no effect over your life. What is real, in any practical sense, is what makes us feel alive. [If this concept interests you, continue reading further for some deeper philosophical considerations. If not, skip to the final paragraph.]

Does fiction exist in any CONCRETE sense? I would like to show there are two ways that fiction can exist, one which appears as a disability and the other an enabling device. In other words, I would like to show that immaterial things can exist in both the negative and affirmative sense.

Imagine that your driving up a narrow, two-lane road up the side of a mountain when you suddenly turn a corner and find that a rockslide has blocked the entire road. There is a huge boulder and you know that it is real because you can no longer move forward. You feel its reality as it stands defiantly in your way. YOU have given IT a reality. Now imagine a fiction novel and the author has just flipped your ethics upon its head. Everything you thought was good and right has now been shown to be false and corrupt. Selfishness and egotism are now the only things that are true. Ideals have been replaced, traded, destroyed, and this new concept now stands in your way. If your mind can’t find a way around it, then it begins to take on a reality, preventing you from continuing in the direction you were going. Just like the physical boulder in the road, this new idea takes a form; not as physical existence, but as a psychological block. Fiction has been made real; the unseen is now visible. YOU have given IT a reality. In one example there is a physical entity and the other an immaterial ideal, but what is real in both cases is that which is felt as a disability.

Another form of reality is that which enables. Instead of concrete as a disability, preventing you from moving ahead, imagine there is a bridge enabling you to pass over a valley. While driving on a bridge you feel like your suspended in air over a treacherous cliff, or floating over a huge body of water. You have given it reality because it has enabled you. In the same way the fictional can enable you to move forward. In another work of fiction you read about a character who is truly independent, authentic and free, living according to his own ideals which are borrowed from no one else save that of his own being. Perhaps in that moment, this fictional character has enabled you to break free from the conventional beliefs of society and to search within yourself for your own answers to life. When before, you were unable to think outside of the box, now, you are able to explore new territory. The physical bridge and the immaterial character in the novel have both enabled you to move forward, and so hold a similar reality for you.

What I mean is that we should be more open to the kinds of myths and stories that Polo has shared. Legends and fictional characters can exist for us just like the boulder and the bridge do. They can disable our progress in life but they can also enable us to move on to places we never thought possible. The immaterial can shape our reality just like the physical. They can open a whole new world to us. The things we thought existed have now doubled. Our world has expanded. 

With two weeks left in my trip, I had been looking forward to what lies waiting for me at home. Family, friends, California and the land and culture that it entails -- the dry deserts, green valleys, high mountains, and the vast coast-lines and the surf that breaks upon them. But now I am ready to discover even more and to search for the mystery that lay hidden in the land; to open my heart to a growth of reality that had always existed, only that I did not exist to it; and to have others join me in the pursuit of the fantastic.

Working with Kids in Nicaragua

Early March Joy and I arrived in Jinotega, Nicaragua, to volunteer with a group of thirty orphan kids. After six months of near constant travel, I was pleased to be settling in somewhere for awhile, for us to stay put long enough for relationships to take root. 

Juan Carlos

During my first week I got to know another volunteer named John and had the great pleasure of working beside him on the garden. He was a mechanic from Wyoming and was able to repair the broken tiller hiding in the shed. All week we toiled over a garden patch until the soil was soft and deep and ready for seed. We helped John and his wife, Beth, in organizing crafts every night for the kids. Nothing brings as much joy as to see the creative display of a child's mind. 

We loved the kids as best we could, and we learned a depth to love that was entirely new to our experience. We saw how discipline was just as important as affection, we found it necessary to be stern even when hugs were so much easier. Though I had been studying Spanish for most of my trip at this point, I never practiced how to yell demands and orders over the screams of thirty kids playing in a phenomenally acoustical gymnasium. Kids can be monsters, but in this place, when every argument, fight, and bullying affair is magnified times ten with an echo effect, the kids themselves believe they are monsters, and they have a powerful roar to confirm it. When kids actually believe themselves to be monsters, there is no authority that could tame them. Let alone authority like Joy and I whose Spanish is already underdeveloped. It was a definite challenge from the beginning. 

Garden Patch

Most of our work meant being the primary caretaker for a group of about eight kids. We would wake them up in the morning, get them dressed, ration out their toothpaste, spoon feed the little ones breakfast, and finally drive a fifteen passenger van full of them to school. This was just the morning. While the older kids were in school we would have to entertain the toddlers, change poopy diapers, give them a shower, and at some point, if we were lucky, get them in bed for a short nap. While they slept, if they slept, was pretty much our only free time during the day. Yet, we couldn't get very far away because then little Juan Carlos would end up sneaking out of his room and running around the gymnasium in his underwear, which isn't an entirely unpleasant sight. After we pick up the kids from school we would return home for a few hours of play before dinner. After dinner more play. More screaming monsters. Then getting ready for bed, which usually took upwards of 1 and 1/2 hours. By the time they finally got to sleep, we were exhausted. Someone remind me that when I decide to have kids of my own, that I don't ever have eight of them. We would repeat this routine every day with little deviation. Even the meals were nearly always the same - rice and beans with corn tortillas. Rarely did we have time to break from the schedule, but when we did, the results were unforeseeable and often disastrous. 

One day I decided to  put on a game of baseball for the kids after school, a privilege only granted to them if there was a volunteer willing to unlock the equipment and oversee the utter chaos that followed. Remembering my glory days in little-league and feeling a deep nostalgia for them, I considered the challenge worth it. But I quickly found that these were games which followed none of the established rules of the sport, and they resembled none of my own childhood recollections. 

Milton during crafts.

Sure, there were bases (blocks of wood painted white), but they were soon split to splinters, destroyed by the end of a bat in the hands of one orphan kid whose destructive tendencies I never could seem to control. And there were bats, several of them, all swinging at the same time, not only towards wooden bases, but at dozens of baseballs all of which seemed to be headed directly towards my face. Gloves were the only piece of equipment in scarcity, but the kids didn't mind. Who needs to catch a ball and tag the runner out when you can just peg him with the ball and let the bruises and tears speak for themselves. I realized this was no game they were playing but a war whose fight consisted of gathering as many weapons possible and using them against the nearest victim you could find. 

There were alliances and enemies I discovered which had been formed much prior to my arrival at the orphanage. My only ally was the three year old Juan Carlos who seemed to think that no flying object could ever reach him while in the safety of my arms. I tried my best to live up to his expectations, but realizing my failure he would notice only in serious pain, I decided to end it all as soon as possible and call it a day. But how does one end a war already begun between dozens of kids who don't speak a diplomatic language? Thankfully, I was saved from finding an answer when the dinner bell rang - the kids immediately dropped all weapons and agreed on a temporary truce for the sake of their hungry stomachs. After that first day on the field, I knew I had to find a safer sport for these kids to use to express their complicated psychological tensions.

It is a general principle that kids everywhere look forward to the weekend as a refuge from school. I find that my most precious childhood memories lie within the few days that lie at the end of every week. There was always something to look forward to, and if it was nothing in particular, it was simply that the weekend was the host of possibilities. But I realized quickly that for kids here at the orphanage, they know ahead of time exactly what will take place during the weekend—nothing much at all. The weekend reserved them the feeling of being trapped on the orphanage grounds, completing choirs outside, and playing movies that had been seen a dozen times already. For our last weekend at the orphanage Joy and I decided we wanted to do something out of the ordinary for the kids. 

We knew about a cross on the top of the mountain that looks over the city of Jinotega, and has thousands of steps leading up to it. It would be only an hour hike, one that many of the kids had done before, but it would be clean air, a beautiful view of the city, and we hoped, a rejuvenating escape offering them strength to continue on with the challenging days ahead. Back at the orphanage there were small fights everyday ranging from verbal wars to flights of fists. It seems like each kid is left to himself to find entertainment wherever he can, and often at the expense of any other kids who find themselves in their line of teases and jokes. There was no sense of unity. It was easy to see that each kid suffered from the pain of neglect, from a lack of love and attention in their life. But since they all struggle with a similar issue, why wouldn’t they come together in support and love? I had had this on my heart the whole week and tried to create opportunities to push for unity in the group. But as the above account of our baseball wars detail, they were often unsuccessful. 

When the group of twenty plus kids and volunteers finally reached the top of the mountain, out of breath, dehydrated, our bodies temporarily broken, in that moment I found another opportunity that I knew would break through. “Your lives are like our climb today," I told them, as we looked down on the city from the sobering view of a mountain perspective, "for some life is more difficult and for others it can be easier. But there is no point in beating others to the top. In the end, you find yourself alone and with no one to share in your triumph. Life is not a race and so you should never feel defeated. Life is about walking alongside your brothers and sisters in Gods love, supporting one another in your trials, and sharing the beauty with others whenever your blessed with a view." 

Our time ended with the orphanage much sooner than we expected. Exciting news from home had come our way requiring us to continue our trek north and head to California much earlier. Life never fails to rebel against our plans and our expectations, we can only know when it is necessary to let go of our seeming control and free ourselves to a gentle flow of un-resistance. From Nicaragua we had several dozens of local busses to catch which would take us through Honduras to El Salvador, then to Guatemala, and finally to mainland Mexico. We would be home in seven weeks time, but there was so much more to look forward to along the way.

Stories from a Caficultor

February 5^th, 2014 

Me and a small group of family and friends had offered Manuel and Carlos our assistance for the day. We were at the micro-mill, which was all but complete except for a few pieces of inessential equipment. An old mustard-yellow Toyota Range Rover had made its way down the windy dirt roads that traverse themselves through the coffee-covered mountainsides of Los Santos and finally ended up at the mill. Its contents were dumped into a holding tank which sat above a giant piece of machinery. The two brothers and business partners in this project, were excited to see through the first truckload of coffee to be wholly processed at their mill. There were two indigenous Panamanian workers manning different stations along the giant de-pulping machine. The machine washed the coffee too, and I was set up to closely watch this section. If the coffee became jammed in the white PVC piping, then I was instructed to add more water. Standing in front of an operating board of controls, Manuel pushed several buttons until they all shone bright red. Small engines began rotating, water began pumping, and the green, yellow, and red machine came to a roaring life. Manuel made his way to each station making small adjustments – he opened some valves and closed others, he strengthened the water pressure at my own station and then he stood back to watch, smiling and proud. He wore a dirty pair of blue jeans that were tucked at the bottom in rubber boots, a blue long-sleave flannel, and a white and blue baseball cap. With sweat dripping down his forehead, his smile slowly diminished into visionary concern. A few of us gathered around him and he began to sing over the sound of the machine.

MANUEL MONTERO:

No I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more
no I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more
Wake up in the morning throw my hands and pray for rain
I got a head full of ideas that are driving me insane
It’s a shame the way she makes me scrub the floor
No I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more.

You know who that is? C’mon, you know it? [He watches us all stare into the clouds as we pretend to recall the song we knew we had never heard] If you’re American you’ve got to know your history! Look, in the 60s when Dylan wrote that song, something was happening across America. The young generations didn’t want to work the land no more. Well, it’s taken a while, but now that same thing is happening in Costa Rica. It’s very bad, but who can blame them? Growing coffee is hard work. You are here during the best time of year, right in the beginning of the harvest, when the trees are producing. You see all the red cherries waiting to be picked. That’s our livelihood right there, that is our way of survival. It’s exciting at this time of year. It’s still hard work, but it’s beautiful. But come back in June and you will see the meaning of hard work. That is when we have to trim and prune the trees, fertilize the soils, plant the almacigos [coffee seeds planted in a bag of sandy, fertile, soil], and spray for diseases. That is when we have to spend most of our money on fertilizers and chemicals. We don’t use much here on our farms, but we have to use some, or the roya [a disease which turns the leaves into a rusty color and ruins the harvest] will take over and ruin our harvest. And we do all of this for cents. So much money is put into growing coffee, and in the end, we don’t get enough to feed our families. People who drink coffee in the States don’t realize this.

No I ain’t gonna work for Maggie’s brother no more
No I ain’t gonna work for Maggie’s brother no more
Well he hands you a nickel, he hand you a dime
He asks you with a grin if your having a good time
Then he finds you every time you slam the door
No I ain’t gonna work for Maggie’s brother no more.

Do you see all this? [motions towards the micro-mill in full operation, the thin stretches of coffee laying out to sun-dry, the hills above us lined with coffee trees, and across the valley to the coffee covered mountains] This is my life. I have a house, a beautiful home up on the hill. Beautiful. I didn’t need it. But I built it for my wife. Also, when my daughter was in high school and I saw that she was embarrassed to bring her friends to our old house...she never said anything about it. But I knew. I built my home for my wife and my kids. Gracias a Dios, both of my kids are now working professionals. My wife is in San Jose right now watching over our grandchild. But do you think I have all of this from coffee? No! I have all this because I worked in the States. Thirty years I was working in the restaurants. The cafés in New Jersey pay their cooks well. But does a man choose to leave his home, his family, his land, to work in a foreign country for thirty years? No. I found the opportunity because I had to. I had no choice. You can’t live off of coffee. I wake up at 4 o’ clock every morning to work, and don’t get back from the farm until 6 at night. I work very hard in coffee because I love coffee, but you cannot live off it. And the young people were raised like this. They know it. They know that in coffee, they cannot hope to build a house or educate their kids some day. And so they don’t want to work on Maggie’s farm no more.

And this is not only happening with coffee. It’s happening to growers of other things too. And this is bad because we’re human and we have to eat. But what’s gonna happen when there is no one left to make the food? Ask that to Wall Street [where the international prices for coffee are set] and they won’t have an answer. They can’t see past the heaps of money they make. But I’ll tell you its not gonna be good unless the kids start working that land.

And if the dam breaks open many years too soon
and if there is no room upon the hill
and if your head explodes with dark forebodings too
I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon.
Do you know that one? Pink Floyd. I respect these guys for writing about the times. Dylan too. They wrote about how it was. They didn’t hide behind the music, or behind words that don’t mean nothing, they said it how it was. It is a global emergency what’s happening right now, and you wouldn’t now it unless you were right here on the farms. I don’t know where those guys on Wall Street are planning to go when there's no more food. To mars or the moon or somethin. But you can’t grow food on the moon!

Whsssstleup!!! [Manuel whistles to one of his workers to unclog the pile of coffee cherries in the holding tank. He walks away to make more adjustments.

We worked a half-day, starting after Manuel and Carlos and leaving well before they finished up, but it felt like a full day of hard labor. Two days later Joy and I were back working with Manuel at the mill. Every day a truckload of coffee was dropped off around noon, and it would take about 5 hours for it all to be de-pulpeded and washed. In the earlier morning we would lay out the coffee from the day before, which had sat overnight in a small bin to dry. During the day while Manuel and his workers operated the machine, Joy and I rotated the drying coffee and hand-picked the defective beans. In exchange for our work the Montero's took care of us. During the day Manuel would send us to his house where his wife prepared us lunch (even though he ate a packed lunch at the mill). Carlos offered us a light breakfast every morning, dirt cheap lodging, and fresh organic coffee of his own multiple times a day. One night we went up to Manuel's house for beers and more conversations about coffee. We talked for hours on his patio over albums of the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, and Frank Sinatra. I was eager to soak up as much information about coffee as I could. Manuel was very learned and educated in the entire coffee industry unlike many farmers who know only as far as the coffee cherries that are being sold. He brought us into his home and gave a night-time tour. It was nice and spacious, ample even according to North American standards. The whole house was built with a nice polished hardwood - the ceilings, the walls, even the furniture was made with the same wood so that the kitchen table and bookshelves matched the bed frames and lamp stand. It was a shock to see when most of his coffee growing neighbors were living in small, windowless houses with surrogated metal roofing over their head. But then he started talking again and I understood with reverence the significance of his home.]

All the wood you see in this house I planted when I was a teenager. My uncle had some land that wasn't being used, and so I got up every morning, hours before school, and planted some trees. After school I would go back and plant some more before starting work with my father. He was always known as a humble man. My father didn't have much. No money. No land of his own. He worked on other people's land. But he had ten kids and we never went hungry. What my father had to give us could be counted on two fingers. I remember the day, as a little kid of maybe 8 years old, when he pulled me aside from my play, put his hand on my shoulder, and said, "Son, I'm gonna teach you how to be honest and how to work. If you can be honest and work hard all your life, you'll never be in want." And from that time onward, when I wasn't in school, I was working on the farms with my dad. So by the time I was a teenager, why wouldn't I be planting trees? It wasn't a common thing to see kids my age planting trees, but they never had to think about their future like I did. They knew they would be given land and money from their fathers but what I was given was a hard-working ethic.  Later I moved away to study in the States. After high school I started working in the diners to pay my way through college. Whatever money I had left over I used to buy land back home. I bought my own coffee farms and I bought the land where I had planted all those trees and now I've used the wood to build this home. And there's more of it too. I have enough wood to build homes for my two kids and my grandson too. It was very cheap to build this one because I didn't have to pay for most of the materials. The tile you see we bought years before at a good price, and they sat around for five years until we saved the money to start building. It is a beautiful home and I am very proud, but I didn't like it in the beginning. When it was finished my neighbors refused to come inside. They felt because I had a nice home I was distinguished from them. I guess they forgot I am a coffee farmer just like them. 

My brothers and I, we found opportunity because we were poor growing up. We knew how to work hard and that is why we have what we have. But my neighbors, they were given land but they didn't know how to work it. Little by little, they lost what they had. One neighbor's son is a drug addict. He don't want to work Maggie's land no more and now he's a drug addict. My kids don't work on the farm either, but they found work in other places. They found more secure jobs than growing coffee. But I hope one day they might come back and work the land. I even pray for my grandson to become a coffee farmer! This is why we've built the micro-mill, Carlos and I. We know that our kids and grandkids won't work the land with the prices the Co-ops give for coffee. Big buyers like Starbucks and Seattle's Best don't pay enough for our grandkids to want to work the land. So we start growing specialty coffee. We build a processing plant. We process our own coffee until its green and ready to sell directly to the roasters. When we get better at it and stop having to sell coffee to the coops, maybe then we will be able to survive off of growing coffee. 

[Manuel  said he would teach me the secrets to the green coffee trade. He gave me books and pamphlets published by the United Nations on everything you need to know about coffee exportation. We mapped out the possibility for my return later this year when I could learn hands-on the pre-harvest work of coffee growing. He gave me passion and a vision for my life that I didn't have before.]

Buying Sound Coffee

After writing some previous posts on my coffee experiences here in Costa Rica, I have been contacted by multiple people asking if I could help them buy coffee direct from the farms I had worked on. They had heard my story and the story of the farmers, and they wanted to buy coffee with a story too. To the first few, I was excited to make it happen. Now that my pockets have been cleaned dry of all the coffee (and not without enormous shipping costs), and now that I've moved on with my travels away from its source, my dream role as coffee trader has come to an abrupt end. Along with the real world are exportation fees and transportation costs that make buying direct between the consumer and producer almost impossible unless you plan to pay tenfold.  

I worked with the Montero family who are just beginning their journey producing specialty coffee and selling direct to roasters and coffeehouses in the States. Because they are so new to this, they are onlyshipping right now to one or two coffee roasters in the East Coast. But after doing a little research I found that there is hope for all my friends in California who want to buy coffee with a story.

If you don't already know them, let me introduce you to Verve Coffee Roasters, an amazing coffeehouse based out of Santa Cruz. This link will take you to them, http://www.vervecoffeeroasters.com/collections/latin-america/products/finca-salaca and specifically to a coffee they are selling right now from the same region of Costa Rica that I was in. They have some information about Maria Elena, the grower of the coffee, who is a neighbor and friend of the Montero's. It can be ordered whole bean at $20 a pound, but it's totally worth it and incredibly special to know who you are supporting when you buy it. Because Verve has a direct relationship with Maria and her son, they are able to give them a significant amount of the money you'll spend. There is another coffee roaster in Ontario called Klatch who have a really nice storefront as well. The direct trade they practice is the best that I've seen by far, and they have done a great job in promoting it. They have a lot of Costa Rican coffees right now that you can see here http://www.klatchroasting.com/Cafetal_Honey_p/cos_ric_caf_tal_hon.htm along with detailed descriptions of the coffee's source. Your pound will be a little cheaper at $15, but you'll have the same satisfaction about the 
farmers you are supporting.

For those in Orange County, if your any coffee drinker at all, you must have already heard about Portola Coffee Lab in Costa Mesa. If not, do yourself the favor and make a trip because if you don't, then your not hip. Seriously though, if you can see past the trends you will find some amazing selections of coffee along with various options of how you would like it prepared. You'll find yourself wanting to throw on a lab coat and some goggles (or RayBand glasses) and jump behind the counter for some crazy coffee experiments. The owner himself, Jeff Duggan, realizes that the only way to move coffee forward is through relationships - "One of my favorite things about coffee is the relationships. It is about the farmer whose hand I shake after buying a phenomenal coffee that he worked so hard to produce. It is about the coffee professionals behind Portola Coffee Lab that I geek out with at the roaster, the cupping table, and behind the bar. It is about the curious customer I end up talking her ear off as I take her on a coffee journey from seed to cup. Simply put, coffee is fascinating. It's not just a beverage - it's an experience. As much as we want to dazzle your palates with coffee made great by the hands of many, fews things are more gratifying than sharing our knowledge and experience with others - you - our customer." -Jeff Duggan, Owner http://www.portolacoffeelab.com/index

If your further up in LA then Intelligentsia is undoubtedly one of the best shops to support where you can buy direct trade coffee. They are located in Silverlake, Venice, and Pasadena, and sell their coffee online. Personally, I think they may have won the title for best coffee shop in Southern California years ago, setting the standard for all others that are now booming up. They have trained award winning-barristas who view coffee-making as an art and career - their direct trade practices insure the famers get paid well over international standards. http://www.intelligentsiacoffee.com/content/history

And finally, to all my friends back home in San Diego, one of my favorite coffeehouses in town is Bird Rock Coffee Roasters. These guys do what no one else in San Diego does - travel the world to build relationships with the people who grow their coffee. http://www.birdrockcoffee.com/ Besides, who doesn't want to escape the inland heat for a drive down La Jolla Boulevard?

So here are some options from coffee shops that I had known already. There is no doubt that many other coffee shops are sprouting up who also pursue direct relationships with coffee producers. Buying direct coffee really is easier than you would think. And when you realize that the quality is so much better for just a little bit more, you are left without a reason, or an excuse, why not to buy sound coffee.

Children of Destiny, Nicaragua - Soon To Be A New Home

Dearest Friends and Family,

As you may have known, I have been traveling throughout Central America for close to five months now with the intent of pursuing whatever opportunities should come my way. I dedicated the first three months to studying Spanish in Costa Rica and then working as an intern for the school. Since then I have been exploring the far reaches of the land – I’ve gone as far south as the Panamanian border and as high as Costa Rica’s tallest peak. I went north to Nicaragua’s capitol were I met my girlfriend, Joy, who decided to join me in the duration of our adventures. Together we have visited palm beaches that line both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and also worked in the mountains at some of the best coffee farms found in this part of the world. Now, we have found yet another amazing opportunity that we would like to share with you.

Months ago we contacted a small orphanage in Jinotega, Nicaragua, called Children of Destiny who have invited Joy and I to join their team as volunteers beginning in March. The ministry is committed to the physical, mental and spiritual growth of 35 children providing food, clothing, shelter and education. Their most important goal as an orphanage is to raise children in a Christian environment where they learn to view life as an adventure, love to learn, become responsible leaders, and develop an awareness of God’s love for their life. The orphanage is located on a small farm where raising animals and growing food is normal part of daily life. While I will be able to alleviate some of the workload on the farm and participate in development projects, Joy will be sharing her spirit with the children through the teaching of music and dance. We are also excited to work together in an afterschool program tutoring the kids in English and other subjects. We feel blessed to be given the opportunity to use the gifts God has given us as a light to children in need and are certain that the following months will be a time of learning and growth for us as well.

The length of our stay is undetermined but we hope to remain with the orphanage for as long as the Lord would have us. We are able to stay as long as our personal funds will allow. Thankfully, the cost to volunteer is very low - once at the orphanage our budget is just fifty dollars a week per person. If you believe in our trip and are within your means, would you please consider sponsoring us? Whether your support gets us through a week or simply one meal, we would be equally grateful to you and for the opportunity to extend our time serving at the orphanage. (If you would like to know more about the orphanage you can find the information online at www.codn.org )

You can send your support using a few different options, online via Paypal or using ground mail. Here is an address where you can reach me:

Jeremiah Idema
31173 Del Rey Rd
Temecula, CA 92591

If you wish to use Paypal you can find a “Donate” link in the right column of this blog which will lead you through some simple and secure steps to giving money online.

Thank you so much for all your love and support. We will continue staying in touch, posting pictures, and updating you with our blogs.

Love, 

Miah and Joy

What Coffeepeople Say About Certifications and Labels

At a hostel I see this book laying on the front counter. I make a mental note. Next day I find a cafeteria owner who will take me to his uncle in the morning, who is a coffee farmer, because I have a pound of organic coffee I want ground. That night I decide to email the author of the fascinating book I had seen earlier. Surprisingly she responds. I plan to buy the book when I return to the States. Next day I make it to the coffee farmers house and see the same book laying next to his small coffee mill. He opens it to page 54 and says, "That is me, Robert Ortiz!" He let's me borrow the book that has made such a peculiar introduction into my life. 

I highly recommend by Rachel Northrop! It is the perfect book to read, little-by-little, beside your cup of morning coffee, and the stories you'll find will make you wonder about the cup sitting next to you. It will teach you more than you've ever known about coffee and voice the lives and thoughts of the producers who make it. You can buy it on the website below for a reasonable price and support Rachel who is currently self-publishing her book. http://whencoffeespeaks.com/

I've dedicated the greater part of three days to quickly make my way through Rachel's book in order to get it back to the original owner, Robert Ortiz, who contributes his voice on page 54. After my own encounter with a coffee growing family from Los Santos, every story in the book jumps out at me. In fact, the famers I worked with know well many of the people included in the book. I wanted to share some of what I've learned from my own experiences and from this book. 

The purpose of Rachel's book is to connect coffee consumers with the people who make it. She is from New York, and has therefore witnessed the current trend in our culture to want to know the source of our food and the push to buy local. Food trends like these have taken root in California as well, and will continue to spread across the country. But the question she had years ago was how do these newfound consumer ethics apply to coffee, a crop that is climatically limited to growing in places very far from the majority of the world's coffee consuming culture? She pursued the literature on the subject to find that there was none. The reality is that we're ignorant about the people who produce our coffee. While there has been an effort to invest in labels such as "Organic", "FairTrade", "Rainforest Alliance", and "Shade-grown," for most people this is as far down the chain their coffee knowledge goes, which I'm finding out, is not very far. This is why Rachel left home - to get closer to the source of our coffee and to record the voices of Coffeepeople throughout Latin America. Instead of returning to write a book filled with secondhand information, she decided to translate and compile hundreds of conversations she had had, and to pass them on to the rest of us in her book. 

Currently half-way through the book, I have learned from coffee growers that labels like "FairTrade" and "Organic" are actually a very shallow and ineffective means of insuring quality coffee and good working conditions. Having worked in coffee for many years, I had heard rumors like this, but never had a complete understanding why these labels can actually be harmful to the farmers who have gone through the trouble, and process of certification, to have them. I am eager to share this information with you because I don't want MY friends buying into the scheme of yet another payed intermediary in the already long chain of coffee production (Remember, the goal of When Coffee Speaks, is to make this chain more transparent between the grower and consumer). First, Fairtrade is a private certification agency which requires farmers to pay $2,000 a year to become and remain certified. It's true that they might be payed a little more for their coffee, that is, if they can find the buyers for it. But this is often not enough to offset the yearly cost of having the certification in the first place. Next, certifications to be "Organic" are also very expensive and time consuming for the famers. The farm must be operated organically for three years before the certification can be applied for. Heaps of extra hard work and care are immediately required when agrochemicals aren't being used, meanwhile, the farmers continue to be payed the same bad price as before. Even after the three years, once the farmer has obtained the certification for his coffee, he is still subject to buyers setting their own prices on it. If they are not agreeable to the farmer, it will be sold at a regular price to the co-op and mixed with all the regular old coffee from around the region. A third-party auditor may come to the farmers land at any time, but they are interested merely in signing off paperwork rather than inspecting the farm or taking soil samples. This means that once a farmer becomes "Organic" there is no guarantee that he stays that way, though the label will (as long as the yearly fees are payed). So when you buy a pound of coffee for $14.40 that is labeled "Organic" or "Fairtrade," you can be certain that a whole lot of other people, from the agency and third party auditors, are now taking a cut of the money, while there is no certainty that it is in every case profitable to the famers. 

One certification that seems to be respected among the coffee farmers in Rachel's book is the "Rainforest Alliance" certification, which requires farmers to preserve indigenous trees and replant new ones, rather than cut them all down in clearing for a new grove of coffee trees, and to diversify their coffee farms with other crops to support the ecology of the land and the health of native animal populations. The more common incentive for famers to obtain this certification is not usually for higher pay, but for a more sustainable operation of their farm. Farmers realize now that if they do not grow coffee in a sustainable way, their won't be a healthy, producing farm left for their children. I believe this is something that coffee consumers like us should intentionally support when we choose where we buy our morning cup of coffee.

The most important message that I'm taking away from When Coffee Speaks is the importance of transparency in the coffee we drink. It's becoming more common in the big cities of the East and the West Coast alike to locate coffee shops who make an effort to sell coffee with identity. Where does our coffee come from? Who are the people that make it? What is their life like? What is the future of their children? These questions should be in the mind of coffeehouses and roasters when buying green coffee, and when we find businesses who work hard to establish these connections, who buy directly from coffee farmers, we should change our coffee habits to support them, to support the people growing our coffee. How do you find places like this? Make a week or month long commitment to discover new coffeehouses in your town/city. At each one, ask the baristas where the coffee they are serving comes from. If it was purchased direct or from roasters who buy direct, believe me, they will know. Coffeehouses who do this kind of thing are proud of it, and are quick to educate their baristas about the proper response (Besides, wouldn't you want your daily baristas to be passionate about where the coffee comes from?). If the response you get is something like, "I think Ethiopia, you know, that one place in Africa," or "Our coffee is the best Italian roast ever," then forget it. Coffee isn't grown in Italy and Ethiopia is too large a coffee producing country to mean anything as a title. The answer you are looking for should make you feel connected to people. What you want is a specific farm or region in a country. What you are looking for are family names, which is usually what a coffee farm is named after. When you find places who know the source of their coffee, pay a little more, drive a little farther, and make the effort to drink sound coffee.

The goal of specialty coffeehouses and roasters should not be solely focuses on better and better coffee every day - the primary goal should be to build relationships with people who grow coffee and to look for opportunities to buy directly from them. Cut out the intermediaries and know where your money is going because it is becoming more and more possibly every day. 

This is what I've seen with amazement while traveling in Costa Rica these last few months. This is what restored my hope in a career in coffee. The insights I have taken from Rachel's book have the benefit of living and traveling in the same coffee growing communities that she did less than two years ago, but I think there is a lot for YOU to learn, whoever you are, inside of this unique book as well. Buy it, read it, share it, and make the daily habit of drinking coffee a more meaningful part of your day.

When Coffee Speaks: Stories From and Of Latin American Coffeepeople by Rachel Northrop

$24 Printed upon order here.

 http://www.mcnallyjackson.com/bookmachine/when-coffee-speaks-northrop