This weeken
d I picked coffee with Angel and David. Angel has three or four plots of land where he grows coffee. Since his wife died about 8 years ago, he hasn’t kept them up with fertilizer and weeding but the coffee plants actually still do pretty well. It takes about 2 full weeks to harvest all of his land.
The coffee harvest begins in the lower (warmer) towns around November and kids are out of school November through January for thi
s reason. We are at the highest of the elevations around the lake so our beans were the slowest to “mature”. Many families here keep their kids out of school through this first month to help with the harvest because this is the income for the entire year. A well-maintained plot about 50 meters by 50 meters might yield $6000. But that’s the best of circumstances. Most don’t own land and so they harvest as day workers, where they make $3.50/day. And stealing of coff
ee is a high risk. One year Angel’s plot was stripped clean in one night by “ladrones”. The police don’t pursue the ladrones so the people are left to vigilante justice. Right now “the aunts”, as we call Angel’s 3 sisters that share our house, say they are having trouble finding “mozos”, or day-workers, to help them pick coffee because there is a social cleansing going on right now. If someone is found on land that isn’t theirs, there may be no questions asked before they are shot. People are afraid to help others pick but, ironically, most people support social cleansing probably because of the frustration that crimes here go absolutely unpunished (Elena found a statistic that 2% of crimes in Guatemala are brought to justice). So the aunts this year are carrying their own coffee out from the field on their backs, a task traditionally reserved for men.
We walked the 20 minutes to Angel’s plot, joining a couple other rela
ted families who have adjacent plots. They start with a series of whistles, each one a signature whistle for the family. Interestingly, here in the house each family member has his own whistle that functions as a name (very Sound of Music). The coffee plants, “mata”, were full of dark red “berries”. Angel would pull the small tree over and tie it down for me so I could rea
ch the highest berries and then I’d just run my hand down each branch popping off the berries, trying to avoid stripping the branch of leaves or berries that weren’t yet ripe. It took about 20-25 minutes to clear one coffee plant and I guess there were about 600 berries per plant (his plants don’t produce particularl
y well). You’re hands get filthy and the sides of your fingers start to get a little raw. I can’t imagine doing it every day. Most people tie a collecting bag around their waist to drop the berries in but I just used a basket on the ground. In nearly 4 hours of work we collected 1.5 quintals of berries. Each quintal goes for about 150Q or $18. The Parrochia pays a “fair trade” price of 200Q but they insist that only the best beans be separated out and the remains are left to sell for much less to other buyers. Angel says they have not been willing to buy his beans.
d I picked coffee with Angel and David. Angel has three or four plots of land where he grows coffee. Since his wife died about 8 years ago, he hasn’t kept them up with fertilizer and weeding but the coffee plants actually still do pretty well. It takes about 2 full weeks to harvest all of his land.The coffee harvest begins in the lower (warmer) towns around November and kids are out of school November through January for thi
s reason. We are at the highest of the elevations around the lake so our beans were the slowest to “mature”. Many families here keep their kids out of school through this first month to help with the harvest because this is the income for the entire year. A well-maintained plot about 50 meters by 50 meters might yield $6000. But that’s the best of circumstances. Most don’t own land and so they harvest as day workers, where they make $3.50/day. And stealing of coff
ee is a high risk. One year Angel’s plot was stripped clean in one night by “ladrones”. The police don’t pursue the ladrones so the people are left to vigilante justice. Right now “the aunts”, as we call Angel’s 3 sisters that share our house, say they are having trouble finding “mozos”, or day-workers, to help them pick coffee because there is a social cleansing going on right now. If someone is found on land that isn’t theirs, there may be no questions asked before they are shot. People are afraid to help others pick but, ironically, most people support social cleansing probably because of the frustration that crimes here go absolutely unpunished (Elena found a statistic that 2% of crimes in Guatemala are brought to justice). So the aunts this year are carrying their own coffee out from the field on their backs, a task traditionally reserved for men.We walked the 20 minutes to Angel’s plot, joining a couple other rela
ted families who have adjacent plots. They start with a series of whistles, each one a signature whistle for the family. Interestingly, here in the house each family member has his own whistle that functions as a name (very Sound of Music). The coffee plants, “mata”, were full of dark red “berries”. Angel would pull the small tree over and tie it down for me so I could rea
ch the highest berries and then I’d just run my hand down each branch popping off the berries, trying to avoid stripping the branch of leaves or berries that weren’t yet ripe. It took about 20-25 minutes to clear one coffee plant and I guess there were about 600 berries per plant (his plants don’t produce particularl
y well). You’re hands get filthy and the sides of your fingers start to get a little raw. I can’t imagine doing it every day. Most people tie a collecting bag around their waist to drop the berries in but I just used a basket on the ground. In nearly 4 hours of work we collected 1.5 quintals of berries. Each quintal goes for about 150Q or $18. The Parrochia pays a “fair trade” price of 200Q but they insist that only the best beans be separated out and the remains are left to sell for much less to other buyers. Angel says they have not been willing to buy his beans. When we were done, we visited a Mayan church, which was a cave with an altar. Angel told us that in the past, inc
luding when he was a child, everyone would go first to that cave and offer thanks to Don Diego Martin, a “saint” who oversees all the land. They would repeat the ceremony at noon and at the end of the day. They would ask permission to harvest. Sometimes you could hear the presence of Don Diego and his horse in the rustling of the leaves and you could hear the sound of his horse d
rinking water. Sometimes he would even speak to you. People no longer routinely give thanks for the crop or ask for permission to disrupt the land and he feels that’s why it doesn’t produce well. Before, his father recounts, there was a great abundance of coffee. If a passerby asked for some of yours for himself, you would be happy to give it to him because you had such excess. Other things can affect the crop as well, Angel told me. One year, he planted while he was drunk and the plants didn’t produce at all. He said that was because he had fire in his veins and it burned the plants. Others have told me that the decreased yield of the crops these days is due to the use of artificial fertilizers. 
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