seis dias despues

so, I have now completed 7 of my 365 days, it´s amazing and strange how things here move both quickly and slowly. Tomorrow I am going out to the campo, where I will start living with the family of Mayra Gamez, president of a small women´s cooperative in El Roblar, Nicaragua. I go armed with my rubber boots, my journal, my mosquito net, and hopefully a mind that i will be able to keep open to all of the new experiences that await me. I visited the home this week and stayed for a night, surprised to find it had both electricity and running water in the brick, dirt floor kitchen, though no toilet, rather a latrine located nearby. While there, I went for a tour of the coffee fields, looked at the beans, saw other fruits and vegetables that were growing there, both for sale and for the families consumption.
Also this week, I had the opportunity to visit Solcafe, the drying plant where coffee grown in the fields here is processed before it is exported. So, I feel I am already getting a good sense of where the coffee is picked, where it is taken in quintales (100 lb sacks) and the process that it goes through before it heads in a bag to a roaster somewhere in the states. I will be excited to return there, to the areas de recepcion, when the harvest is actually happening, and the whole dry mill is full of coffee. Though it seems obvious and silly, it is phenomenally interesting to actually be in the places where this transnational economy takes place. The farmer walks up to the mill, places his sacks on the scale, has each sampled for quality, and from there recieves a reciept. The coffee then passes through multiple processes, drying, fermenting, peeling, and then hand selection, before it is ready to leave the country. It is interesting to see how this coffee market, this fair trade area, operates at a business level, which it obviously is, but which is not the aspect that is stressed about Fair Trade coffee where it is consumed. So though I know that is no kind of synthesis, just some rambling observations.
The last thing I want to comment on on here today is related to what it means to be here, as a foreigner, who knows nothing about coffee, and is here with relatively little to offer in return for people who are opening up to me their lives, their homes, and their perceptions. I have just finished reading an article about service, and what it means, where it stated that people who come to help somewhere, see life as weak, those who come to fix, see it as broken, and those who come to serve, look at life as it is as whole. I think that this struck me particularly as someone who is entering from outside, from a place where Fair Trade is seen as a wonderful thing, and where there is a certain amount of pity related to thinking about "poor third world farmers" and their situations. However, in the short time I have been here, I continue to be struck by the open heartedness, the joy in the people I meet. The grandmother in the family I am staying with, who lves her telenovelas and cannot wait to teach me to make tortillas, the son with his girlfriend, the father with his pool playing friends. Their lives, will challenging, are also whole, full, like everyone´s, of love, of food, of hard hard work. There is nothing here that I can fix, or help, I can only offer what I have, a body that is willing to work, a mind that is hungry to learn, and a spirit that is open to being touched by this experience.