Wade Rathke: Chief Organizer Blog » Marcala

Life in the Coffee Mountains with Co-ops Big and Small

Mariehurt — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 14:31:23 +0000

Sorting at RAOS

Marcala Thanks to our friends at the small women’s coffee and aloe vera cooperative, COMUCAP, we usually stay at their cabinas high in the mountains. There’s no water or electricity, but the setting is beautiful and the bunks work fine for us. They hope someday eco-tourism will come their way, who knows? We started driving up before dark and a light, intermittent rain quickly turned some of the clay and rock road up the mountain into gumbo. We were almost there and two large multi-ton work truckers were stuck ahead of us. One got through, leaving deep ruts wounding the road and bleeding red clay. The other backed down the rise, forcing us over to the shoulder. We tried to climb through twice, each time lacking enough clearance in the small rental car to make it, and ended up backing down ourselves. We found a $20 hotel in town with hot water, then jumped a ride with a 4×4 diesel Toyota pickup first thing in the morning to recover our gear, none the worse for wear. Life in the coffee mountains!

COMUCAP and its hopes for eco-tourism

The late morning and early afternoon were spent in productive meetings with COMUCAP about plans to buy coffee and to sell aloe vera. They are now fair trade certified by FLO in Germany, so we believe we may have potential customers for them in Canada, if we can figure it all out.

The trick for us in coffee is now bringing back crop samples to New Orleans so that our roaster at Fair Grinds can test the quality of various crops and see if we can get others to join us in buying a larger lot of coffee to directly ship to the city. Before this trip is over we will lug 30 pounds of green, dried coffee beans back for roasting to see if we can organize a buying cooperative from the cooperatives, as it were. The devil is in the details though, and we are struggling to get the pricing in line.

Cupping some of the coffee for us at RAOS

We had run into a fellow I had originally met at COMUCAP on my first visit three years ago, who was now working at another, larger coffee cooperative in Marcala called RAOS. He invited us to take a look at their operation. Wow! We were impressed. It was huge comparatively. Two shifts of workers, including rows of women sorting out bad beans to ensure the quality and gangs of young men bagging the beans, including fair trade and multi-certified beans, as well as rakers to keep the beans dry, and other workers cupping the coffee in the lab, working the drying machines, and altogether adding up to probably 100 workers employed not as producers but in the final process after the beans left the coffee plantations. RAOS produces enough coffee to ship 30 containers to various markets.

Filling a Fair Trade quintal at RAOS

It was encouraging to see how producers could come together to get to the next level!

Facing the Competition to Land a Big Broker’s Contract

Mariehurt — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 01:25:00 +0000

Marcala The day moved in the slow deliberate, yet sometimes desperate, speed of the countryside, filled with quite, almost boredom, one minute, and adventure and mayhem the next.

We started down the mountainside to an uncertain appointment in Marcala. We were joining our friends at COMUCAP, the small women’s coffee and aloe vera growing cooperative, here in the mountains of the state of La Paz, abutting the El Salvador border. Even before we got to the restaurant out of town where the tasting competition was to be held, we were all curious how it would work since the word was already out that there would be no electricity in Marcala until 4PM in the afternoon. That answer came quickly with the roar of a generator when we arrived, but the rest took longer to unfold, since the brokers and the tasting committee from Korea and Belgium were late.

We didn’t mind at first because it gave us a chance to meet some of the other co-ops from around Marcala, most of which were very large. There were five Marcala co-ops in the tasting competition, so we got a better idea of the world past our normal sightline.

The brokers with Coffee Team and others had organized the tasting. The price being dangled involved something like contracts for 7 containers to Europe, but that was never expressly stated that I could hear. One co-op recognized a taster/broker he had sold to before and during the tasting, got the OK high sign from the taster after the spitting and sipping was done. The Korean women reportedly represented a group of specialty coffee shops and bought haeavily as well, but who knows. This was the brokers show and everyone kowtowed to them, including starting whenever they were ready.

We continued to learn more and with every conversation our margins of error got thinner along with everything else. It was fascinating.

After our debriefing we headed up the mountain before nightfall in an uneven, but mainly light, rain. Unfortunately way pass the halfway mark we came upon two huge dump trucks in the middle of a slippery incline. The lead truck was in the ditch and being dug out, successfully, but leaving rutted road behind him. The second truck was backing down and giving up getting by. In our little rental Toyota with no clearance the odds weren’t good. Nonetheless I tried twice to make it up the hill only to have to back down and finally abandon the notion of making the mountain this evening.

Limping back we heard from COMCUCAP that they had won several ribbons against this stiff competition and been invited to Copan for the next round. For our part we ended up being led to a $20 per night motel and pulling into the gravel lot, I joked that anyone of those pickups could have gotten us up the mountain. True indeed! A closer looked showed the same brokers running more testing trials in the rooms of the motel for the coffee men in front of their trucks.

Marcala coffee in this region according to a brochure the co-op coordinators left out has a famous and distinctive taste, slightly acidic with orange-citrus notes. I didn’t realize it before, but now that you mention it, I can taste everything from the dirt up in Marcala now.

Colors and Dawn on the Marcala Mountains

dine — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 16:02:23 +0000

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 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!