Wade Rathke: Chief Organizer Blog » Hurricane Mitch http://chieforganizer.org Founder of ACORN, Chief Organizer at ACORN International, Author of Citizen Wealth, Global Grassroots and The Battle for the 9th Ward. Wed, 23 May 2012 15:43:21 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Learning Direct Trade in the Coffee Mountains of San Juancito http://chieforganizer.org/2012/03/29/learning-direct-trade-in-the-coffee-mountains-of-san-juancito/ http://chieforganizer.org/2012/03/29/learning-direct-trade-in-the-coffee-mountains-of-san-juancito/#comments Thu, 29 Mar 2012 22:39:54 +0000 Mariehurt http://chieforganizer.org/?p=6620 View of San Juancito

San Juancito     At first I was confused driving out of the serpentine mountains and hillsides on which Tegucigalpa is perched, but then I realized that we were on the same highway we had traveled a year ago to Valle de los Angeles, a small, pretty colonial spot specializing in pupusas and tourists.  [...]]]>

View of San Juancito

San Juancito     At first I was confused driving out of the serpentine mountains and hillsides on which Tegucigalpa is perched, but then I realized that we were on the same highway we had traveled a year ago to Valle de los Angeles, a small, pretty colonial spot specializing in pupusas and tourists.  We took a left, avoiding the town, and kept rising in the mountains until we stopped in a even more beautiful area where San Juancito, an old hard rock gold mining town, is working a comeback after its mining scars and after Hurricane Mitch as a coffee center.

A lot of this story of resilience and recovery revolves around the coffee cooperative whose operations are now in an old mining office in the center of this small village.  We met there with Tatiana Lara and her son, Mario, who detailed the operations of COMISAJUL, Cooperativa Mixta San Juancito Limitada.  Before Hurricane Mitch, COMISAJUL was exporting 15 shipping containers worth of coffee out of San Juancito and its mountains.  That’s a lot of coffee!  A container holds 350 quintals or sacks of coffee.  Each quintal holds 100 pounds, so one container is 35000 pounds of coffee more than most medium sized towns might drink in an entire year.  At their heyday before the storm they were moving almost a half-million pounds of coffee per year (525000).  Now they are producing 8 containers worth of coffee or 280000 pounds, a bit more than half of where they were hardly a decade ago.

Tatiana Lara

Mario loaded all of us in the bed and extended cab of a Volkswagon 4×4, and we bumped and crawled up the mountains until we came to Finca 1, the first of the 4 farming areas of the cooperative.  They had built a very efficient and ecologically sound operation there to wash the cherries and separate out the green beans.  They made compost and fertilizer from the residue and put the beans out to dry.  Once the beans are down to 30% humidity, they would transport them to lower, hotter elevations to finish the curing of the beans down to 12% humidity, ready for shipping and roasting.  COMISAJUL sells all of its coffee to Europe in Germany, Norway, Belgium, and the Netherlands.  About one-third of what their 453 members produce is FLO certified organic coffee.

This is my third trip to various coffee coops in Honduras.  In the process I’ve learned a lot, ended up with more questions than when I began, and, finally, now that we are running Fair Grinds Coffeehouse in New Orleans, we are in the market on our own account, putting our own skin in the business of finding improvements on the fair trade model.  What Dona Caffe or Queen Coffee, as Senora Lara is called in Honduras and I were trying to figure out is a way to do direct trade, cutting out the middle brokers and others to see if we could do better for the producers, purveyors, and consumers.  The more we all talked the more we seemed to have not only an interest in great coffee in common, but deep and abiding concerns about FLO and the way fair trade is developing.  COMISAJUL and Senora Lara are active in organizing an alliance of Central American producers that would take the next step and directly link with us and others through direct trade.

Mario

While driving away from one of the coffee fincas, Mario had stopped near the abandoned American mining headquarters, its old school, and small village of houses.  The large building, he said had been the first US embassy in Honduras.  I’ll have to check on that.  There was a bronze plaque set on the grounds that gave the elevation.  It read almost a mile high which would make great coffee and about reach the level of our excitement.

We have other stops to make and the devil is now in the details.

]]> http://chieforganizer.org/2012/03/29/learning-direct-trade-in-the-coffee-mountains-of-san-juancito/feed/ 0 Colors and Dawn on the Marcala Mountains http://chieforganizer.org/2010/01/23/colors-and-dawn-on-the-marcala-mountains/ http://chieforganizer.org/2010/01/23/colors-and-dawn-on-the-marcala-mountains/#comments Sat, 23 Jan 2010 16:02:23 +0000 dine http://chieforganizer.org/?p=2687 Marcala           In an afterthought I had thrown a small flashlight in my bag.  You never know.  As Tim sings, “there’s the cowboy in us all,” and with me there’s still a boy scout deep down riding alongside I guess.  Good thing.  We had driven up the mountains from Marcala in pitch dark to where our [...]]]> marcala mountainsMarcala           In an afterthought I had thrown a small flashlight in my bag.  You never know.  As Tim sings, “there’s the cowboy in us all,” and with me there’s still a boy scout deep down riding alongside I guess.  Good thing.  We had driven up the mountains from Marcala in pitch dark to where our team was being housed for the night.  Arriving we could see the large porch of the recently finished brick and concrete structure until the car lights went out, then nada but the half-moon and stars.  One lone candle was lit in the middle of the room where we enjoyed sweet tea – organico, as they kept saying – after plopping our bags on the bare concrete floor.  A little later when we were led down a rough path to a cabin, the absence of running water and electricity faded next to the joyful surprise at finding a nice bunk bed with clean sheets.  Hey, it’s the little things that count.  I slept like a baby in the pitch dark until the predawn when I woke with the campesinos to see the morning light come over the green dotted fog of the mountain sides.

             We had started the day at eight in a makeshift meeting room in the hotel chapel with many of our union brothers as well as several new companeros from NGOs and the University.  For hours one after another listed the issues in and around San Pedro Sula that needed attention and organizational activity:  water, remittances, housing, public services.   It was a long list delivered in lengthy and passionate speeches listened to respectfully by all interrupted only by the appearance of a Channel 39 TV reporter who had heard the discussion was going on and that I was in town.  At noon we drove through some of the colonias including one fascinating development some of my union brothers showed me where the union had built the houses and the school.  This was only minutes away from a new highrise condo development abutting one piece of a small creek in San Pedro Sula.  Another sign down the road indicated the future would be filled with these luxury developments, the first in the city.  Another five minutes away and we were looking at a squatters development along a larger riverbank where families had been forced after Hurricane Mitch’s devastation in Honduras, as still remained.  Driving away we could see children swimming as their mothers washed their clothes in the calmer pools of the stream

            Next stop was a quick lunch and visit with a woman and her family who had graciously invited us over for pico gallo in the Honduran style with red beans.  The reason in the interconnected world of organizing:  her sister had been a member of ACORN in the Queens.  Anything she could do to help, just ask.

            Though there seemed to be no hurry to the drive, and it was a good thing since construction and 18-wheelers had us parking for long stretches as we crossed the mountains on the good highway from San Pedro Sula to Tegucigalpa, we parked in Marcala in one of the barrios and followed the noise and music into a giant structure just in time for a young political theater company to begin their presentation.  There were several hundred children and a score of adults in the crowd, as the moderator shouted, “Silencio!” over and over to gain attention.  Suyapa explained to me that this was part of a celebration for the women in the community, but the theater company brought much more to it.

            This was a well acted and rehearsed production by a half-dozen enthusiastic late teen or early 20′s actors.  In the beginning a “generalito” – small general – with his lieutenant wanted everything to be gray, gray, gray, and the three citizens, two women and one man, lived in gray huts in fear.  As the play developed to great humor and passion from the actors and increasingly the crowd as they warmed to the theme, the caricature soldiers in the face paint of Batman’s Joker gradually lost control.  Singing and dancing would erupt and pull the people off of their knees to find that they could walk and be happy again.  At the same time their huts turned from gray to white, pink, and green.  A giant bride dressed in white appeared on stilts and danced along as well.  A toy cannon exploded and led the soldier to defect to the people until the generalito was deflated with the air escaping from him like wind from a bag.  More singing ensued.  Children were pulled from the crowd.  Marching and dancing.  My summary doesn’t do the play or the skill and quality of the actors justice for this hour long presentation, but it was one of the few times where one had the feeling people were staying for the action and not the frijoles and tortillas passed out to all of us with plastic cups of weak coffee at the end of the show.

            There may have been a fake election in Honduras to try to rightsize the military coup, but the scars will wear deep among these people.  When the elected president announced on my first day in country that he was agreeing to go into exile in the Dominican Republic there was no celebration about his volunteering to take the first step to “reconciliation.”  It seemed hollow, and this children’s play with its well practiced themes and smooth presentation was hardly designed for this one show, but was traveling around the country.

            All of these things were on our minds as our eyes closed in the dark last night.  We were staying at the unfinished compound organized as a project to support the campesinos in this area. 

            It was an honor and a gift to have lived this day!

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