APOCS Relief Essay

I wrote this essay about some work that I helped with in Guatemala in November. Though I didn't finish it until recently, I still thought it was relevant and decided to put it up here despite its tardy arrival.

Rainiero and Marta Julia work away the hours in their respective corners of the unassuming office of the Association of Organic Coffee Producers of Sololá. These days they are working particularly hard. APOCS is a small organization administered out of two rooms in the Jucan-Ya neighborhood of Panajachel on Lake Atitlan in Guatemala. .
For a short period, the area surrounding Lake Atitlan was the center of world news reports because it was extremely hard hit in early October by hurricane Stan. Now APOCS uses its energy to further the relief effort for devastated coffee farmers. An important part of the work is to make people understand the human tragedy that has occurred and that this tragedy is ongoing and requires our continued attention in the form of financial support and volunteer efforts.
Coming into the lake, the devastation is painfully visible and unbelievable. The mountainsides that were uniformly lush and green are now marked by vast gashes of exposed earth where landslides have swept away hundreds of thousands of tons of earth, rocks and plants. Houses, crops, livelihoods and loved ones were swept away as well. Now, many weeks later crucially important highway bridges are being reconstructed so that businesses can be put back together, homes can be rebuilt and gradually lives can be reinvented.
Right now, Guatemala’s small scale coffee producers are entering the harvest season. They are struggling to make it through, many of them with no houses, with their communities destroyed and with their coffee fields under mudslides or dropping leaves and coffee cherries due to stress from too much rain. However; they are working on making it through.
I spent two weeks in November hiking into these communities, all of which are affiliated with APOCS. In order to effectively meet the needs of these farmers impacted by Hurricane Stan, APOCS and Manos Campesinas took it upon themselves to perform a diagnostic of the damage caused by the storm. Eddy Garcia, an agricultural technician and professor from Solola, was in charge of the project and I was allowed to tag along. We were sent out to interview, photograph destruction and assess the damage to the 30 plus coffee producing cooperatives and associations of Atitlan..
We boarded buses and the beds of open pick-up trucks in order to reach many of these remote locations. We hiked up cobbled and dirt roads and met with gracious shy, but determined farmers in one-room cooperative offices operating on the front porches of the local stores or around people’s kitchens.
I cannot recount the scores of stories from farmers and families. I traveled into each of these small communities for a day or for an afternoon and I was faced with sights of destruction and renewed poverty. Women were carrying heavy buckets of water kilometers to get it to the house since Stan had destroyed the pipe system that supplied Panamaquip’s water supply. Men walked me to their parcels once covered with coffee trees and now submerged under meters of mud and boulders. Farmers showed me how their stressed trees had dropped leaves thereby endangering what remained of their source of income, the small portion of their coffee crop left after the wind and the rain subsided. Houses were half visible buried in mud while some were unusable as they now teetered over ravines carved out by torrents of rain water that poured down from the mountainsides and into the lake.
Despite the damage done in each of these places, the farmers welcomed Eddy and me with smiles, water and a place to sit down. They thanked us profusely for the interest in their current predicament that our presence demonstrated and for the possibility of relief in the future. They shared their stories with us as well as showing us what was lost, but they also imparted anecdotes of some successes. In one community, holding tanks for irrigation water, constructed a year ago through a cooperative project, turned out to be the only reliable source of drinking water for the entire community during the crisis. The association and its member families are now looking into constructing more tanks in the future. I was shown how natural wind barriers, constructed of trees, corn or other plants that were part of ecological projects to further soil conservation actually saved some parcels from landslides. Each of these positive examples illustrates how prior organization and education done by farmers aided them in the critical days following Stan.
In the months since the hurricane, many groups and individuals have appeared to help to meet the immediate needs of farmers. Through such organizations as Sustainable Harvest and it’s Relief Funds as well as other NGOs and local organizations and the Guatemalan government , food, clothing, and other necessities have been given out. Some of these replaced the staples of corn and beans which farmers grew for their own consumption that were lost in the Hurricane. The reconstruction of homes has been completed in many communities and farmers work to rebuild terraces and fences even as they resign themselves to significantly lowered incomes due to losses from the coffee harvest as well as losses from secondary productions such as tomatoes, cucumbers and avocadoes. Yet they work day by day, to get through this year with whatever they can, grateful for the indispensable aid that has reached them from outside.
However; one of the things most stressed in the report of the survey is the fact that the crisis does not end this year. Even after the horrendous losses of this year are calculated there are long term effects to be seen in the future. There will be losses in years to come due to the drop in production from lost trees that take years to grow again.. It takes three years for coffee trees to mature enough to produce beans. Farmers will contend with nutrient depletion from the loss of topsoil. They will have to restore shade trees that provide necessary canopy for the coffee plants. Many farmers will spend some years digging out parcels that lie four feet under sand and rock and mud. It is a long arduous trip back to the self sufficiency they were creating. It is good to remember that victims continue to struggle long after the immediate empathy and support generated by a catastrophe has receded. These trials brought by Mother Nature set back the achievements and successes generated by committed farmers who wish to better their communities and the lives of their children with hard work and mutual support. Continued contributions and volunteer work and creative ideas will always be a necessary component that all of us can provide.