Transportation

In Guatemala, there are many means of transportation. Most famous and world renowned, are the chicken buses. As in Nicaragua, the Guatemalan chicken bus tends to be a converted American school bus, transformed by paint, decals and exhortations of “Jehova es mi guía” or “Dios bendiga este bus” so as to be an unrecognizable cousin of their tame black and yellow relations. Here in Guatemala, they also often take on the tradition of ships, being named for women. I have traveled in Emilia, Wendy, Camela, Cristina, among others since my arrival here one month ago.
The name chicken bus is derived for a reason. They crowded aisles, seats, and overhead racks are always chock full of people, of bags of avocadoes, of huge baskets of huipiles (traditional clothing textiles), bread, necklaces and fruits. There is always the cobrador, who walks the aisles, encouraging more passengers with his proclamations that “Where there are two, fit three”. But, most importantly and almost without fail, on each chicken bus one can find a chicken! You may have to look closely, but part of the game of this unruly experience of careening around curves on top of thirty people you just met, is locating the notorious chicken. Or tied by the feet and held in the hands of a small boy, popping its head out of a woven bag secured to the railing of the seat in front of a row of petite Guatemalan woman, or squawking noisily from a basket in an overhead rack, the sight of chickens on the bus is a necessity for any truly chapin journey.
However, as charming as the chicken buses are, with their plethora or people and interesting articles being transported, the real subject of this rambling is rather the pickups that serve as the second most common form of true guatemalteco transportation (I am not including the many tourist minibuses that cart gringos from tourist destination to tourist destination along these same highways as legitimate Guatemalan transportation, as in these, even the driver is only occasionally a national).
In each town, and indeed often in more than one place in each, there is a crowded street or corner, full of buses, of people yelling, of moving luggage, exhaust and various comings and goings. It is organized chaos, with much more chaos then organization. Near this lively scene, which is the large chicken bus station, there is usually another station lacking even the occasional gringo visitors, but complete with all the other hustle and bustle. Here is a line of pickup trucks of various sizes and horse power as well as diverse states of disrepair. Each is outfitted with a metal frame over the open bed, vaguely resembling the metal frame of a house with four posts and a peaked roof. As on the larger buses, people shout out names of various, less frequented destinations. Everyone from children newly walking to old men with machetes and women in traditional dress with no teeth and there hair wrapped around gorgeous textiles pile into truck bed until they are as dense as the line for the Star Wars premiere.
Though I have not yet frequented this method of transportation as much as I would like, it seems to be absolutely the best way to see and experience the countryside. It is like an open air tour bus taking passengers to places far off the tourist track, accompanied by the postman, by people returning from the market, by people going about their day to day lives to and from home, happy to talk to you about the cilantro fields and churches they point out along the way.
Each of these modes of transportation has its charms and perks. For me, I hope to get to see a lot more of the world from the open air 360° view of “los pickups”.

Finca El Valle

I finally got up the guts to call. Sometimes, even when you have what you need, it is hard to find the conviction to contact new people, to put yourself out there, to make things happen.
But, I did it. I called Cristina Gonzalez, owner of a medium sized coffee plantation just outside of Antigua, Guatemala, and producer for one of my contacts in the states. She runs the farm, which originally belonged to her great grandmother, with her husband and three sons. It is in a very renowned place for coffee production, as Guatemalan coffee is among the world’s best, and Antiguan coffee the top of the Guatemalan hierarchy.
I called and asked for Cristina, explained who I was, and she immediately agreed to come and pick me up! I was picked up by her son Luis, taken to their lovely home which is directly across the street from their beneficio humedo, or processing plant. I was ushered in and introduced to the whole family, shown the one room office from which they do all their business, and told the history of the farm, the issues that they are facing this season (a lack of workers mostly), and the story of their current relationship with Sustainable Harvest, the company that I have a connection to in the states.
Though Cristina is not a small scale producer, or part of a cooperative, she is involved in an ongoing relationship with a company that seems to do business not only with Fair Trade producers, but with a Fair Trade mindset, referred to by them as a relationship model. What was so heartening about this visit, was really seeing how that works. The way that Cristina talked about her relationship with David, the manager and founder of Sustainable Harvest, the photos that she showed me of their visit to Portland, where the office is based, and also to the offices of their roasters, and to the Whole Foods stores where their coffee is for sale, show a deep connection, respect, and admiration between the people involved. One can see that there exists a lasting exchange, on economic, personal, and emotional levels. Here is a family that works together, all of them, in different aspects of a life that has been theirs historically, and they are able to make it work. They are not desperately poor, nor hugely wealthy, but live very comfortably. They are happy building their lives in a nurturing way, providing a commodity and service to a market that wants it, but as more than just an economic bargain.
This meeting has also been very important for me and my own understanding of what I am doing. While I am focusing on small-scale producers, I have to challenge and remind myself that people who are prospering outside of that model are not bad people. There are various ways to make a living, to earn it, and that they do not all have to be doing so in the same way. The Fair Trade model is largely about fostering socially responsible business practices, about creating connections between individual people for the betterment of the entire system, about developing nurturing relationships. I count myself lucky to be able to witness and become part of those relationships, which are beautiful and unique and connecting all kinds of people, be they involved in cooperatives or not.

the park

Seated in the parque central, I observe all that is passing around, gathering thoughts, sights, visions, expressions of a new country. The plaza is surrounded by cobbled streets and arches buildings, a cathedral, ochre and mustard colored buildings, housing fancy shops the likes of which were unimagined when the buildings were originally constructed. The center of the park is the fuente las sirenas, the mermaid fountain, so named for the fours mermaids holding their breasts that adorn the column at the fountain’s center.
The benches around the park are bathed in warm sunlight from the crystal blue sky, which feels close enough to touch, like a physical presence permeating the atmosphere. Circling the plaza is a man relating the gospel at the top of his lungs, pausing from his reclamation of sinners and glorification of God only when a passerby hands him a quetzal for his effort. Tourists and locals alike sit on the benches, take photos, neck in broad daylight, enjoying this central place for people watching, eating lunch, passing hours.
Soon, I am approached by a small girl selling credit card sized calendars for 2006. Her name is Juana, she is 7 years old, and works selling these cards, as do her two brothers, while their father sells ice cream on the corner. She wears a woven skirt, typical indigenous dress. She shows me her broken shoes, explaining that a friend is buying her another pair. Quickly, she becomes interested in the postcards that I am writing, then turning her attention to my pen. We spend a while drawing on her hand, first a boot, then a sun, she erasing them with saliva when bored with each. She runs away, and quickly returns, leaning against my legs, as if we have known each other forever.
In the few hours that I have been walking around the city, I have been approached by all kinds of vendors, caulking their wares from textiles to necklaces. I have met Berta, Martinsa, Sandra, María. We joke, they convince me to buy things I mean not to. The interactions are enjoyable and genuine, and I remember the gift it is to be here connecting with all manner of people I would otherwise never meet.

Clamoring Interests and Multiple Realities

I think that I have only seen them in magazines, things like People. Okay, there are a bunch of people at Hamilton that also fall into this category. And I am sure that I have met many more of them that I didn’t even know belonged to this group. But this weekend, I had my first real experience with a national elite, and certainly my first real experience with the world’s coffee elite.
The Nottebohms are a family of German descent. The two that I spent the weekend with are Tommy and Charlie (Tomas y Carlos), grandchildren of the first Nottebohm to come to Guatemala. Both grew up here in Guate, both still work in the coffee business, and both have Guatemalan and German passports. They are states educated, and the upper echelons of Guatemalan society. At one point in Guatemalan history, there were the third largest producers of coffee, and now own the company that commercializes the exports of more than half the nation’s production.
This morning, the lovely trio of Carlos, Tommy, and Tommy’s wife Kix picked me up in Antigua. We went first to a house one block from the main plaza (in Guatemala’s main tourist destination city) that Kix is restoring to all its formal glory. From there, we traveled to a celebration at a plant where the Nottebohm’s macadamia nuts are processed. Macadamia for Hershey’s and other international buyers was their crop diversification plan when world coffee prices fell. It has served them well. At the luncheon at the plant, I enjoyed a world-class lunch and joking conversation while sitting next to the Harvard educated Director of the Guatemalan Central Bank.
In the afternoon, we visited various farms that belong to Tommy. I experienced for the first time massive coffee production, on farms that are measured in how long it takes a horse to get across them in a day. These farms process between 100,000 and 150,000 pounds of coffee each day, which comes out to about 20,000 pounds of green, exportable coffee. In Nicaragua, I was dealing with people that produce 300 pounds of green coffee in a season. The farms are swarming with indigenous workers, hired for thirty day periods to come and pick during the harvest, given tortillas and rice and beans, paid $3 a day.
In the evening, after visiting various farms, talking to various people, we arrived at the farmhouse, a lovely, historic structure with a tiled wrap around porch and a caretaker. We chatted about the coffee business over spinach dip and wine by candlelight. We discussed lack of schooling among workers, and a lack of desire as seen by the Nottebohm’s, about how they feel that the plantation lifestyle must be coming to an end, but that that doesn’t necessarily mean things will be better for the indigenous workers, who are accustomed to the relationships that exist with the farms. I couldn’t help but thinking of the antebellum south prior to the civil war as I sat in a charming setting with charming people, trying to understand a glimmer of these relationships, this context, and the future of both people like the Nottebohm’s and those that work for them.
This weekend, I have learned about coffee, about big business, about charming well-educated, very wealthy people; about industrial coffee dryers and the Guatemalan civil war, about ‘society’, about rubber and macadamia nuts. I have been with pleasant people that I both feel I connect with and to whom I feel a genuine estrangement. I have been invited to their lovely homes, helped to make connections, treated like royalty and had any and all of my questions answered.
I am both surprised and taken aback by the way that workers on his farms call Tommy “Patrón” (Master) and “Don Tommy”. I am made uncomfortable by the ominous distance clearly present between me and the people working on the farm from the moment that I arrive gazing at them out the window of the SUV. In many ways, I want them to know that I feel more allied with those peering timidly into the windows of the SUV more than these people whose lives much more resemble my own.
But it is not all so simple. In their paternalistic way, the Nottebohm’s are attempting to care for the people that they hire, start schools, feed children. Though the housing does not belong to them, on the farm the mozos or workers have homes and clothes and work. But none of it belongs to them. And they work for their keep and $2.50 a day, in the face of people who own five houses. In this light, what is fair? Who has a right to what kind of lifestyle? Can one person be condemned and another supported? I don’t know, but I am amazed, confused and impacted by seeing this whole social antebellum, plantation structure, so far yet so related to the models I am examining.

mugged...

It had to happen sooner or later. Everyone has one of those stories, particularly from traveling in a foreign country. So here goes mine…
I arrived this evening in Antigua, Guatemala, the famous and beloved colonial capitol, full of ochre and mustard colored buildings, two dozen odd colonial churches, uncountable espresso bars, and the majority of Guatemalan tourists. The cobble stone streets remind me of Guanajuato, Mexico, where I spent my 18th year of life, and alone seem to merit the city’s status as an Unesco World Heritage Site. In short, Antigua appears to be an absolute paradise, beautiful, refined, cosmopolitan, set amidst the world’s largest Mayan populations, against a backdrop of picturesque volcanoes.
I checked into my hostel, The Yellow House, had a lovely chat with the two girls who are sharing my dorm room, and prepared myself to go out to make a phone call. I thought quickly that since it was night time, I would take only what I absolutely needed, a few quetzals (Guatemalan currency), my small notebook (it had the phone number I needed), and the hostel keys. I walked the lovely well lit streets to the downtown, found a small café to make a phone call, marveled at the mermaids in the fountain in the city’s central plaza, and headed back toward the hostel. 8:15 on a Friday night, the city was crawling with open restaurant verandahs, adequate light, disco music, other extranjeros and locals.
I decided to walk back to the hostel one block west of the street I had come in on, glancing down it to be sure it was well lit and populated. It was. However, half a block down the street, a young man who came up beside me. I turned and smiled, thinking he was one of the many young Latin men that come up to chat with foreign girls. I saw the knife he held in his left hand. I stopped, and he stopped, and told me to give him all my money. I forked over the few bills and coins in my pockets. He demanded my cell phone. I just arrived in this city today, have never made a habit of having a cell phone, and certainly don’t have one now! Then, he demanded my watch, tried to grab at my pockets to see what else I had, decided he was happy with the watch and stomped off in the other direction.
Stunned and shaken, I quickly walked in the other direction, making the first turn that I could back to the center and the most populated street I could find. Clearly, my heart was racing, my palms sweating, and I could feel scared tears welling up behind my eyes. I found the street I had walked down originally, and trucked it back to the hostel.
Reflecting back, even a few minutes later, I can only shrug my shoulders. Fortunately for me, I was smart enough not to have gone out with anything more than I needed. I had been carrying my passport and ATM card in a pouch under my pants, which fortunately for me, he didn’t know to look for. I am almost overcome with the luck that I had, to have come away from my first mugging, at knifepoint, short only a few dollars and a cheap digital watch.
Still, I find myself a little indignant. I am here to find out about this country, to learn, to experience. I bear no malice. However, none of this matters to him, as he is trying to make a quick buck. What could I have done differently? Is his situation so dire? Where does he fit in this national economy? What else is at play in the show of power that is wielding a weapon? Would he really have stabbed me? Would all the equality in the world stop people from stealing from each other? More and more to think about…For the time being, I am going to be glad to sit here in the hostel, to reflect, and to be short nothing more than my watch and a few dollars. Though I have glanced at my wrist probably 30 times in the last hour to check the time. Oh well. Chock it up to life experience, be grateful, find a new watch, and remember not to go out with any more than you absolutely must. I sure hope that he wears the watch, and at least gets some good use out of it...

Quarterly Report Number 1

Okay, so I know that this is going to be really long, but it is some little synthesis of my experience in Nicaragua. So, read it if you want, keeping in mind that it is the first thing I have written and had to turn into anyone since graduating from college six months ago. Eegads! Soon to come will be some more things about the last couple weeks, sorry for being so slow!

When I found out I had received the Watson in March, I had an overwhelming sense of “What the hell have I gotten myself into?” and “How in the hell am I actually going to do everything that I said I was going to do?” I was excited, nervous, and slightly overwhelmed. When I arrived in Nicaragua, in Matagalpa, at the office of the cooperative, and at the home of my first host family, I had an overwhelming sense of exactly the same thing. I realized that for all of my liberal arts education, my theory, my anthropology classes, I had (and still may have) no idea how to do fieldwork. I struggled with what questions to ask people and with how to get to the information that I wanted to extract. I decided to apply myself to doing interviews, and focus on learning everything that I could about all aspects of the lives of small scale coffee farmers.
My greatest challenge has been how to concretize my project even as I argue with myself about whether it should be more concrete. I am gaining immense experience and knowledge on many disciplines, all related to coffee, to cooperatives, and to the lives of the people that I am meeting. The knowledge that I gather is vast and varied. It is all related, but there are so many aspects that I need to come up with some means of thinking about them separately in order to have an accounting of all of the elements. Part of me struggles to create a system to understand what I am seeing. There is the social aspect of cooperatives, the organizational aspect, the business aspect, the coffee production, the coffee processing, the coffee trading culture, as well as the national culture and individuals that I am encountering. As a successful and dedicated student, I struggle internally with whether or not it is enough to just have this experience, try to absorb it, or whether I need to look at everything more analytically, as if with a mind to produce a thesis, or “something” of value. I struggle with these questions almost daily.
Along with these struggles, living the last three months in Nicaragua has taught me a great deal. I have had countless moments where I have felt lost, figuratively and literally. I have also had countless moments where I have looked around and felt that I was seeing exactly what I had come to see. I have attended cooperative meetings, accounting capacitations, programs on the development of ecotourism, assemblies on passing bylaws for a system of communal banks for women. I have been to schools that have been built by communities with the help of their cooperatives. I have bought enchiladas from a woman on the street who hardly left her house before the women in her community formed a coop, and I have walked the five kilometers to secondary school with kids who pay for their notebooks and uniforms on cooperative scholarships. I have learned to cook food grown on family farms, to make coffee without a French press, passed hours in cupping labs, and spent days picking coffee cherries, walking through fields, and learning to identify everything from diseases to plants that I couldn’t have imagined three months ago.
I have found that my desire to work with cooperatives really means working with people. The majority of coop members are happy to participate, but being in the coop is not their sole identity. It follows then, that much of their attention is focused elsewhere. In Nicaragua, “cooperative business” has not meant individuals debating theories every day, or meeting to talk about the coop, or anything so abstract.
Living in small scale farming communities has de-romanticized the processes around Fair Trade and cooperative organizations. This has been interesting, taxing, and touching. One of my goals in this project was to gain a better understanding of what development priorities are in communities of small scale coffee farmers. It is important to know, but also difficult to comprehend, that many of the crucial things needed in these communities are hugely practical. The physical and immediate needs mean that the focus is often on latrine and highway projects, on essential, daily necessities. Although the literature on Fair Trade implies that social premiums and long-lasting trade relationships utterly alter the situation of poor farmers, the changes are not as drastic as they make them seem. They are big and important, but it is not as if people move from adobe shacks to homes with tiled floors. Rather, they may move from a stick hut insulated with plastic to a cinder block house with wooden windows and a dirt floor. They have an easier time getting their coffee to the market on a road with a new level of gravel, but are still getting it out on their backs or maybe on a cart. I have not been disillusioned by seeing this, and have actually been inspired, but it is interesting to note how the actual reality differs from the one that I had imagined and which some of the literature presents.
I am attempting to discern what ways cooperatives have influenced the relationships of families and communities. Within these situations of pressing daily necessities, it has been wonderful to see how many people are also working on less tangible questions, on how to create a more just and inclusive society, on how best to support one another so that the communities can flourish, on how to provide opportunities for concerts and exhibitions that validate the joy and humanity that are present in their lives. The cooperative projects are more than economic; they are social and human. People cite opportunities that they have had to learn about women’s history, or accounting, and how those skills have helped them, but also how the simple act of getting together with their neighbors has enriched their lives. In this way, the projects are important for the physical changes that they foster, but also important in many immeasurable or intangible ways. They make it possible for people to enjoy and nurture one another.
It also becomes clear when one arrives here that cooperativism is one among many models for development. It is not the one, the only one, or indeed the right one. There is also not one form of cooperativism. There are small and large cooperatives, secondary coops, coops that are largely supported by outside funds, and others that are mostly self-sufficient. I have met both organized and unorganized farmers, and there is a whole conjunction of factors that contribute to the success or failure of particular groups or individuals. I am faced with the questions of how to separate the two: how much of success is based on a communal model for development, and how much on the capacity, determination and vision of the particular people involved? I am also faced with the knowledge that the two are inseparable, that they affect each other, which leaves my liberally educated brain wishing that I had more tools to analyze the issue analytically, rather than just being able to say that this is what worked in one place and not in another.
For this reason I am trying to record what are the essentials of successful cooperatives. What are the qualities of the leaders that work with successful cooperatives? What measures have they implemented that contribute to success, participation, and tangible changes? What resources do they have at their disposal? How do they utilize them? What resources are lacking that would aid them even more? All of these questions I now attempt to include in my interviews and conversations, thereby learning more about what makes particular cooperatives work or not work.
On a personal level, the last three months have been challenging and exhilarating, confusing and lonely, and full of new connections. I have been completely awed and impressed by the people that I have met, by the way that I have been taken in, cared for, and accepted. That is not only including the wonderful families with whom I have had the opportunity to share this experience, but also strangers on buses, street corners, or entering a convenience store. Nicaraguans have been quick to offer me their help, their phone numbers, meals in their houses, after knowing me for only moments. Acceptance and generosity, particularly among people who by many standards have very little, have been what I have encountered most.
It is extraordinary to no longer think about Fair Trade, producers, Nicaragua, coffee fields, as abstract places, but rather to have friends who live here, to have been able to incorporate these concepts into my life. I have come to understand that even in the places that I read about in books, that are talked about as poverty stricken, or as models for development, or as any other term, really are just communities of real people, living along and doing the best that they can. They are people that get up in the morning, that work, that laugh, that struggle, that cook and read and play with their kids. Their lives, while on the surface very different from what mine has been, are based around the same activities. People have the same insecurities, the same joys, whether they live in a mud shack or a mansion or a college dormitory. I have met people that remind me of my parents, of my heroines, of my friends, speaking other languages and living different lives, but with similar conceptions of justice, progress and fulfillment. Living this knowledge and experience has been eye opening for me, making the world seem a smaller and more connected place. It has also affirmed for me the existence of an extensive and diverse community of people who share some of my values, and are also working to “make the world a better place”.
As the first three months of my project come to an end, so does my stay in Nicaragua. It is challenging, sad, strange and exciting to think that from here I am moving on to another part of this journey, in another country, another culture, another context. I feel that I have taken advantage of my time here well, but also feel that there is so much more to learn, so many connections to continue to nurture. I am already trying to think how I will be able to return to visit the families with whom I have bonded, and wonder how I will incorporate them and the knowledge that I have gained while here into my life after this year. Moving from the time when I first asked these questions hypothetically, to actually working to answer them, I ponder how my inquiry will evolve over the next nine months. How universal are the issues that people are struggling with? What are the unique solutions small scale coffee farmers are creating to confront those issues? Realizing that with every day another part of the experience that I have imagined for myself becomes a memory, I am more determined to get out of this time everything that I can, in all the ways possible. It reminds me that it is an unbelievable gift to get to be here, making these connections intellectually, but even more important, humanly.