For Love of Coffee

I cannot describe in words the economic poverty in Haiti. I have worked and lived all over the place, and still never seen anything like Haiti. I thought Bolivia would compare, but it does not. I notice that I now use Haiti as the benchmark....arethe roads as bad as in Haiti? Are there as many people living without clean water, electricity, and something besides an open fire for cooking? Is adult illiteracyas high? Are there as many houses that look substandard?

The answer is always no. I hate writing this, truthfully, because I feel like all my Haitian friends who receive these emails will be horrified. Haiti is much more than economic deprivation. As I write this, I am drinking Haitian rum and thinking about past fun times in Baraderes (...singing Haitian folk songs in the rectory in Baraderes at the top of our lungs, teaching the middle school students how to sing "We Are Marching in the Light of God" in 5 languages, drinking Prestige beer on the balcony...). Haiti remains in my heart, which explains why I spent 9 days of my vacation there.

And yes, it has more to offer than just fine alcoholic beverages.....When I was working on the US-Mexico Border last summer, one of the groups CPT worked with was called JustCoffee, which is the brand name of a cooperative of coffee farmers in Chiapas, Mexico. The organization buys the coffee from its members at a fair trade price, then roasts, bags, markets, and ships it to the north. Providing a just price to the farmers and keeping the jobs in Mexico is way of facilitating people being able to stay on their land, instead of migrating through the dangerous desert heat and the Border Patrol in order to findbetter wages up north, in the US.

I began to think that perhaps we could replicate the JustCoffee model in Baraderes. I knew from past work that there are coffee farmers in Baraderes, and also that at one time Haiti produced some of the best coffee in the world. I also knew that St. John's has done awesome work in Baraderes with education and public health, but while the children are being educated and staying healthier, there are still no jobs. Anyway, long story short, a group of us assembled to test out the idea, and found it warmly received by the coffee producers in Baraderes. So we traveled in October to talk to the farmers and see the coffee farms.

The trip to the growers involved a long and grueling hike in the heat and humidity. When we reached the top of the mountain, the site of the home of one of the growers, his wife greeted us with freshly-prepared coffee served on fine china. This was in a home with no sanitation facilities and with dirt floors.

We are all learning a great deal about coffee production. These are useful things that they do not teach you in seminary, such as what color the berry has to be when you pick it, how to husk them by hand, and what is the most common coffee bean pest. I am now the proud owner of two manuals about management of the commoncoffee borer.

We are still processing what we learned in Baraderes and have not made any decisions about how we will proceed next. We brought back about 25 lbs. of green beans for quality testing and will evaluate the results. As the project continues to unfold, I will write about it.