Saturday, February 28, 2009

Humble Learning

I.

La Guaria shouldn't even count as a town. On the dirt road between Santa Elena and the Pan-American highway, it amounts to four or five houses, a pulperia, a church, and a cemetery. It's one of those towns where, by the time you realize you're in La Guaria, you aren't in La Guaria any more.

I spent last Saturday night in La Guaria, at the farm of Doña Santamaria and her daughter Sandra, a wonderful twenty three year old woman who lives in Santa Elena with her husband (the town veterinarian) and Marcos, their two year old son.

Sandra is on the junta directora of the feria del agricultor (director's committee of the local farmer's market) – I think she's in charge – and is trying to promote the Saturday morning market by recruiting more local farmers, bringing school and church groups in to perform, and increasing awareness that the market even exists among residents as well as tourists. This is the third iteration of the market in the last few years; it has started and failed twice, but attempt number three has been going for a year now. I've been a few times (usually to buy mangoes, a watermelon, or empenadas) and every time I have witnessed a steady stream of English and Spanish speakers wandering around the high school gym and buying produce from the six or so farmer's tables.

Sandra and her mom sell homemade queso fresco (“fresh-” or “farmer's cheese” – un-aged cheese popular throughout Costa Rica and, I think, Central America) at the market. Her mom makes the cheese at the farm we visited, with help from her daughter a few days a week and her son, who is studying accounting in Puntarenas, on the weekends. They keep chickens, cows, two hogs, and a horse.

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After the market ended last Saturday, four of us piled into the back of the family's covered pickup truck for a bumpy, hour-long drive down the mountain. Our mission: to learn about the farm, and document some part of what they do to turn it into a three minute slide show or video, which will be aired at the feria de agricultor as part of a series advertising local farming and the benefits of buying local.

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The family was amazingly sweet and hospitable, and they opened their home to us, fed us, and allowed us to generally get in their way for twenty four hours on very short notice, expecting nothing in return. But the weekend was extremely awkward for me, painfully so at times, as we struggled to communicate, tried really hard to not be overly obtrusive, and failed pretty miserably at actually being useful.

The weekend was one of what our anthropology professor calls “humble learning” and was the first real cultural challenge I have experienced so far on this trip.

II.

Maybe two kilometers past the houses and the cemetery of La Guaria, a nondescript gate marked the farm entrance, and the old pickup slipped and slid a final kilometer down the steep gravel road to the farmhouse. The farm was a beautiful concoction of stuff, piled everywhere in a this-looks-scattered-to-me-but-whoever-put-it-there-did-so-for-a-reason sort of way, exactly how I imagine my attic to look in 20 years, and how I am sure my living room will look until I get around to owning an attic.

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Years ago, a windstorm had blown their house down, leaving nothing but the raised wooden foundation. They have since built a new house right next to the old, so the flat wooden surface that used to be the floor has essentially become the biggest private deck in Costa Rica.

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We spent the afternoon getting a tour of the farm and hearing about their chicken side-business (they buy and raise chickens, a few hundred at a time, to butcher and sell in Santa Elena). We met the cows and the horse, played with Marcos (Sandra's two year old), ate mangoes and watermelon, and walked down to their soon-to-be fish pond to watch the tail end of a beautiful sunset.

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The bumpy, rainbow-filled ride down the mountain and the lazy evening had taken our minds off the humble learning of the morning, mainly a wonderfully botched “do I kiss you on the cheek or not?!?” greeting, halted and confusing conversation about transportation and sleeping arrangements, and attempting to rearrange and cancel our other weekend's plans (we had no idea until that morning they intended us to stay the night) without cell phones or answering machines.

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The morning, however, brought it's own host of humility-inducing moments. We woke up at seven to milk the cows, but only one of us had any real experience. Sarah's older sister owns a farm, so she did just fine. The rest of us were total beginners: Haeinn and I had milked our first cow two weeks earlier when we visited Don Evelio's farm, and Amanda, despite her repeated statements that weekend that she wanted to have a milk cow when she grew up, had never actually tried to milk one.

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The next couple of hours involved:

  • me trying in vain to coax an unruly cow into the barn, only to have it keep walking away from me as I repeatedly tried to run around behind it and not just scare it further away;

  • Sarah, Amanda, and I all getting shat upon by the cows we were trying to milk;

  • Marcos, with the best milk mustache I have ever seen, actually walking right up to us as we milked, sticking his empty mug between the udders and the bucket we were supposed to be filling, and drinking what little milk we could eek out straight from the cow, leaving our buckets empty; and

  • Being absolutely sure we had gotten all the milk out of a cow there was to get, only to have Sandra or her brother Eric walk up and, while holding a conversation and looking another direction, fill up a half a bucket in two minutes.

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Haeinn and Sarah left at around 10:30 to catch the Santa Elena-bound bus from San Jose that passes by the farm each morning, but Amanda and I had other plans. After eating breakfast with the family, and then spending an hour peeling the shrimp that would be our lunch, we went back out the farm with Sandra's mom to learn how to make cheese with the fresh milk. Being only two people was a lot less obtrusive than being four, and we got a chance to watch, ask questions, and help as she separated the curds from the whey, added a coagulant and salt to flavor the cheese, laid a cheese cloth into their one stainless steal mold (now I know where cheese cloth gets its name!), and compressed the to-be-cheese liquid into the mold.

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III.

Every time we had mentioned the notion of walking back to Santa Elena, the whole Santamaria family, as well as Sarah and Haeinn, pretty much laughed at us and called us crazy. As Amanda and I finished lunch, and realized both how hot it was at mid-day this far down the mountain and just how far down the mountain from home we actually were, we started to wonder if we were crazy, too.

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We left the house at 2:15 to start the trek. We had no map and didn't know exactly how far the walk actually was, and it didn't help that we spent the one hour drive down the day before in an enclosed camper with no windows: we had no landmarks to base our progress on. It was only one road though, and if we needed to, we could flag down the bus from Puntarenas, which would pass us at some point that afternoon.

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It was amazing. The dirt road, up hill the whole time, traveled along the top of a mountain ridge; our view switched back and forth between the green San Luis Valley to our east (where we hiked a few weeks before) and a crystal clear view of the Gulf of Nicoya and the Nicoya Peninsula to our west. We were passed by car after car of tourists and Ticos, some of whom gave us nods of respect (we were really far from anywhere) and the rest of whom just looked at us quizzically, wondering what the hell we were doing. We were offered – and we subsequently turned down – three rides (all by Ticos, none by tourists), and when the bus from Puntarenas passed us at around 5:00, we waved it on only to see our friend Hillary stick her head out a window to say hi as the bus drove by.

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In between what we think was almost twenty kilometers of good conversation and repeatedly gaping with awe at the overwhelming beauty that surrounded us, I spent the hike struck a pervasive spirit of fulfillment. I have spent the last five or six years noticing with envy travelers who were, in my book, doing it right: the French tourist I met in the Desolation Wilderness in California a few years ago, backpacking solo with a towel as a sleeping pad and apples and bananas for all his meals; the older couple Ben and I ran into in a Bryce Canyon, Utah campground last summer, on the last leg of their circular, eight week nationwide road trip and National Park tour; and the groups of two or three young people I see everywhere traveling their way, walking across Europe, biking across the US, or flying to Costa Rica to surf and take yoga lessons.

This was finally me. Twenty three may be a small number of people to go to school with, but it's a huge number to travel with, and this program has reminded me how much I dislike group travel and how hard it is experience a place from the window of a tour bus. It was just an afternoon, but it was the epitome of how I want to travel, both here in Costa Rica and in the future.

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---

When I publish this post, it will be early Saturday morning, the first day of our Spring Break. We're off to see our first Costa Rican dry forest and an artisan community frequented by one of our professors, then Nicaragua for two days and back to Costa Rica for a few days on the beach. More here in a few weeks.

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Feliz día de San Valentín

I'm horrible at keeping secrets, which made the first two weeks of February incredibly hard for me. In our group of twenty three there are three guys; a Valentine's Day surprise was Jesse's idea to start with, but David and I caught on right away. This was not something we could half-ass: if we were going to do something, it had to be over the top.

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As if Anibal, or program coordinator, had known about our plans before we did, an overnight had been planned for the night before Valentine's Day.Our entire group would be hiking down an extremely muddy path into the Bosque Eterno de los Niños to spend a night at the San Gerardo Biological Station, a rustic two-story building two miles into the forest.

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The hike in was beautiful, and the sun was just coming out after a few weeks of heavy rain. A few parts were a little dicey – a couple of people wiped out in the mud, while the rest of us had a number of close encounters. We walked slowly, stopping to check out nifty plants, a massive swarm of army ants, and a crazy millipede (did you know they secrete natural cyanide?), among other things. When we stopped to eat lunch, we counted monarch butterflies migrating past us on their extremely windy journey east – the cross-Costa Rica journey is impressive considering that on windy mornings I can barely keep my feet on the ground as I walk 1.5 mi to school, but not so amazing considering that some monarchs have been known to cross the Atlantic ocean as a part of their seasonal migration.

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We were led by an exuberant British guide named Mark Wainwright, who has lived in Monteverde for ten years as an illustrator and a naturalist, working with scientists in the area illustrate field guides of birds, amphibians, and mammals, researching amphibian extinctions, and leading tours for people like us. Listening to him and talking to him, content aside, was amazing and fulfilling for two reasons – he not only speaks passionately about science but has the unique and enviable ability to talk about scientific concepts and findings in English instead of whatever language most scientists like talk about them in. Even cooler, he radiated the presence of someone who was unabashedly doing exactly what he wanted to do with his life, while making enough in the process to get by. In the words of the principal of my first high school, he was lucky enough to have his job (day-job) and his work (life-work) be the same thing.

mark rocks.

Did I mention that Mark has the ability to make things spontaneously appear? Yeah, make that reason number three: on a night hike through the woods that Friday, he pulled firefly larvae (5mm long worms that emit a tiny glow that turns on and off like Morse Code) and a nocturnal cricket with 8 inch long antennae out of thin air, and then walked twenty meters up a creek bed, reappearing with a tiny colorful frog no bigger than my thumb.

macro mode.

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By Saturday morning, Jesse, David, and I were ready to go: we had spent Wednesday and Thursday night making twenty hand-made Valentines (and drinking excessive amounts of beer), and the twenty roses, three boutonnières, and sixty chocolate truffles had been quietly tucked onto the back of the four-wheeler that carried our weekend's supply of food to the Station. Jesse and I had visited the two thrift stores in town (called “Ropa Americana” in Costa Rica: who knew that store owners throughout Central and South America could buy old clothes given away by people in the US...by the kilo?) and bought collared shirts and tuxedo vests, Jesse had carried in his fully-charged computer (there was no electricity that morning) with a Valentine's Day playlist made for the occasion, and I had hiked in with a carefully rolled and painstakingly hand-made sign for the occasion:

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In an attempt to market authenticity, the sign outside of almost every small restaurant in Santa Elena says "Typical Food" at the bottom, except I had no idea there were that many different ways to misspell "typical."

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We got up at 5:30 to set everything up and start cooking. Unfortunately, the heart-shaped pancakes idea failed pretty miserably, but with a lot of help from Anibal and the family who runs the Station, the breakfast itself turned was great. We avoided the kitchen, instead locking the girls upstairs as we set the table with the cards, roses, and chocolates. And that was that... they came downstairs and we served them breakfast. They were pretty surprised, especially after we had spent the last week being totally disinterested in their secret Valentine exchange that had happened the previous day.

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After breakfast and another hike through the woods – we saw an Ornate Hawk Eagle (really rare – the first one Mark had ever seen) and what Mark claimed was a Puma track, but just looked to me like a pile of ruffled leaves – we were given the option of hiking out at our own pace. Amanda, Abby, Hillary and I gobbled down lunch and bolted immediately, giving us time to explore the small trail that we remembered splitting off from the main one, marked by a small sign that said nothing else but “catarata” (“waterfall”).

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As we hiked in, I remember Amanda saying that she wouldn't be surprised to find Jesse, who had been the only person to get out before us (he has a tendency to sneak off without telling anyone), sitting at the top of the waterfall meditating. Twenty minutes later, we stumble upon one of the most hidden, idyllic-beautiful-indescribable-in-words-or-pictures scenes I have ever seen in my life. And Jesse did not disappoint: he had just beaten us to the base of the waterfall, and a few minutes later he fulfilled Amanda's prophecy (we all followed him up to the top right after I took this picture):

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After sitting at the top of the waterfall and wading in the water at its base for a while, we hiked back out and ran into Mark, the last one to leave the Station, when we reached the main trail. It was perfect: I had been hoping for a chance to talk to him all weekend, and as we hiked up the muddy hillside, I got to ask him about his life (he has an eight year old son and moved to Monteverde on a whim after college, a year after spending a semester in Costa Rica studying abroad). We talked about sustainability, American politics, and Barack Obama (go figure...), and I am proud to say that not once did I mention working for the campaign – ever since the inauguration I have been trying really hard to not make campaign stories every other thing that comes out of my mouth.

so good.

Anyway, we made it back up in no time to meet up with the rest of the group at the trailhead. That day was the most beautiful and enjoyable I have had in a long time; to make it even better, I'm pretty sure my boots have never been that muddy in my life. At some point in the few days before Valentine's Day, I remember hearing Elise mention that her favorite question to ask at dinner parties is, “where is the most interesting place the shoes you are wearing right now have been?”

One day, I hope someone asks me that – until then, I'll be wearing my hiking boots to every dinner party I go to.

it was muddy

the catarata crew

Sunday, February 15, 2009

This farm isn't organic.

Imagine following this daily schedule:

4:30 – wake up
4:30-8:30 – milk your cows
8:30-9:00 – drink coffee, eat breakfast
9:00-12:00 – prepare feed for cows, feed them, tend your small farm
12:00-1:00 – eat lunch, drink more coffee
1:00-3:00 – care for other farm animals: goats, chickens, and the horse
3:00-5:00 – milk your cows again
5:00-6:00 – eat dinner
7:00 – go to sleep

This is the schedule of Don Evelio Vargas, the dairy farmer we met two Fridays ago. He showed us his seven hectare farm, on which live seventeen cows, four calves, a few goats, a few chickens, and one very important horse. He follows this routine every day of the week, all year long, and has been for the last twenty eight years. When his two kids were young, he would carry them out with him to the barn in the mornings, and they would sleep next to him as he milked the cows; his son could milk as well as he could by the time he was four. He keeps a small garden, uses worms to convert cow dung into fertilizer, and speaks with a sense pride about his land and his work so obvious that you don't need to speak Spanish to understand.

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His farm is absolutely beautiful. Green and hilly, live fences and clumps of original-growth forest divide the farm into 27 grazing paddocks and serve as windbreaks to protect the cows, his crops, and the land itself from the winds that could probably, in the absence of the trees, tip cows with no human intervention. And, like many small farmers in Monteverde (and, I hope, many small farmers in the world) his farm is “sustainable,” “organic,” and “hormone free;” except he has only been using those words for the last few years.
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I'm no farmer: the time I have spent on farms in the last month (two or three cumulative days) has been just about as much as I ever have in my life. From my city-boy perspective, the concept of buzz-words like “organic” and “fair trade” make a lot of sense, especially when products with those labels are compared to the rest of what you can buy at Safeway or the grocery section of Walmart. So much of the produce we eat in the US (and most cities worldwide, I suppose) is grown unsustainably that the need to distinguish food that is healthy, for the soil it is grown in as well as the people who eat it, from the food that isn't is pretty clear.
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What do these words mean to people like Don Evelio? He isn't “farming organically” or producing “hormone-free milk,” he just runs his farm like his dad did. His cows are fed a combination of grass, sugar cane, and molasses because it produces the best milk, not because corn-fed cows are bad. The cows rotate through the 27 paddocks, spending one day on each at a time, allowing the grasses to regrow not because free-range cows are better but because it keeps the cows and the land healthy, and it has for the last two and a half decades.
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Like so many small farmers, his farm is organic because that's how he was taught; his farm is sustainable because he doesn't have seven more hectares to move on to if he screws up the seven he's got; and his farm is spray-, pesticide-, and hormone-free because, for the most part, it's his wife and his kids who eat the food that comes out of his garden.
(In Don Evelio's case, there is one exception: as a shareholder of and producer for the Monteverde Cheese Factory, a corporation owned almost entirely by 230 local dairy farmers, he knows that if he delivers milk to the factory that has even a trace of antibiotics or artificial growth hormones, he will be fined and put on probation for a month.)
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These “green” buzzwords are our way of attempting to define a difference between the enduring reality of horrible agricultural practices that have existed in the United States for the better part of a century and an idealized vision of a more connected, more responsible, and healthier agricultural process. For people like Don Evelio, who already practice that vision, these words used to carry little meaning.
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But that's changing.

What meaning these words have stem mostly from American influence. Don Evelio may label his produce “todo orgánico” to lure the foreign tourists who buy food from at the Santa Elena farmer's market to his stand, just like the Santa Elena Coffee Cooperative (which I blogged about last week), which has paid the hefty fees to put the official “organic” and “fair trade” logos on their exported products so they fetch a higher price.
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More, these imported labels serve as distinctions from imported products and practices. Don Evelio might call his farm a “finca sostenible” to distinguish his farm from the massive plantations in the Central Valley run by American-owned agricultural behemoths. Additionally, he makes sure to keep his milk hormone- and antibiotic-free (additives imported from the US) so that he isn't put on probation by the Cheese Factory, a company founded by the American Quakers who settled in Monteverde in the 1950's.
These words are still just words. Sometimes they are abused, like that massive monoculture of a Pineapple plantation we visited our first week here that somehow pulled off official United States Department of Agriculture “Organic” certification. In most cases, the words themselves don't have a big effect on the producers themselves: people like Don Evelio will continue to farm sustainably with or without the label, and corporations like the Standard Fruit Company will continue to be short-sighted and profit-driven even if the “organic” label comes with a few pesky obligations.
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Yeah, that's me milking a cow.

I guess my point is that it's not the word that is important; it never has been. It's the culture of respect and comprehension that everything is very literally connected to everything else that is so essential: what we feed ourselves affects how (un)healthy we become, how we treat the animals we eat affects the quality of what we eventually consume, and how I work my land very directly controls how my children will be able use it when I'm gone.


Don Evelio does not live an easy life. I don't envy him. But we can all learn a lesson from people who live like he does. My professor's partner is a birder, naturalist, and wood carver. A few weeks ago, during a guest lecture about bird identification, he said of their one-year-old son: he will understand how many things live in, on, and around trees, and because of that he will never cut down even an acre of forest.

May it be so, for all of us.

Thursday, February 12, 2009

Steven Seagal and Costa Rican Cake

I was watching TV last night with my host family, and on the news was none other than Steven Seagal, who is visiting Costa Rica right now. He got an audience with Oscar Arias, the President of Costa Rica, and took up about 10 minutes on the 7 o'clock news. If Walter Centeno, the star midfielder of Saprissa, the kick-ass Costa Rican soccer team, visited the States, he wouldn't make the news or get an audience with the President. Just another one of those power things that reminds me how lopsided the world is.

It also occurred to me that I haven't written any blog posts on my blog yet – just thrown lots of essays and stories at you. So maybe I should back up a little bit.

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I've been here a month now – almost four weeks in Monteverde, on top of the first week we spent in San Jose, the lowlands rainforest at Tirimbina, and Fortuna, where lake Arenal and the Arenal volcano are. I live with a great host family in Santa Elena, a town of about 4,000 where everyone is related to everyone.

My host parents, Elida y Eloy, are in their early seventies – more like my host grandparents. Eloy does some work on local farms depending on the day and the season, but otherwise tinkers around the house. Elida knits like it's nothing (purses and hats with her eyes closed) and cooks for the family, which takes up a solid portion of the day when you're working with a two burner stove connected to a portable propane tank, a microwave, and only two or three pots and pans. They have four sons, mostly in the forties, all of whom live and work on a farm in Upala, a town in the northern flatlands of Costa Rica, close to the border with Nicaragua. One of Elida's and Eloy's grandchildren, Bryan, has lived with them since he was three, when his parents got divorced. He's 14, and he's totally the cool kid – short spiked hair and Adidas and Puma track jackets all the time.

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Bryan is a great translator – he helps my host parents figure out what I'm trying to say in Spanish, and explains to me some of what my host parents say in simpler Spanish. He's also a good translator of culture, and I'm not talking about mine: every night as they watch TV, he's explaining the facets of Costa Rican youth culture broadcast over the airways: reality TV shows, dubbed Simpsons episodes, and the most recent episode of ¿Quien Quiere Ser Millionario? to his grandparents, and to me.

This is such a different experience for me than my trip to Honduras in high school. I have my own room in the five-room house, and running water is potable and pretty consistent. We have electricity and cable TV, and Bryan has an old computer that he plays video games on (no internet, though).

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Motorcycles are everywhere, which makes me real envious, and pretty much all boys, as well as many girls, learn to ride in their early teens. They ride in conditions I would never dream of riding in: mud, rain, and wind like none I have ever witnessed. Some of roads I walk on are like wind tunnels: in the morning I have to lean forward as I walk if I actually want to get anywhere, and in the evenings sometimes I have no control each step over where I actually put my foot down.

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But the views are amazing. Every morning and every night we all walk along one section of road with a stunning view of the Gulf of Nicoya and the Nicoya Peninsula, which sits on the Pacific coast. If you leave the Institute at the right time in the afternoons, you catch an amazingly beautiful sunset, different every night. I worry that one of these days I'm going to start taking it for granted – as it is, sometimes I have to remind myself to pause for a minute and just watch.

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In other news, you know when you cut a round cake, it's really hard to get it to look right, especially at the center where it gets really narrow? In Costa Rica, the first thing you do is cut a circle in the middle of the cake. You cut the outer ring first, and then the inside circle.

It works SO much better.

Or maybe I just don't know how to cut cake.

Thursday, February 5, 2009

La finca de Don Victor

Uhh... why does this sound so academic? Every Friday, we leave the Institute to see some part of the Monteverde community/economy in action, and are asked to write a response to each field trip. This is one of a series of posts that are part-blog, part-homework, so it's a little more background-heavy than most.

In Latin America, coffee = important. Costa Rica is no exception: when coffee production exploded here in the 1830's and '40's, the mighty little bean catapulted the country into the world of Atlantic trade, starting what would be a long history of commercial and cultural exchange.

The word “exchange” gives the relationship Costa Rica (and pretty much every other Central and South American country) had with the rest of the world far too much credit: It connotes a certain level of bilateralism, respect, and equality that simply didn't exist. I'll do my best to not bring out my dependency theory soapbox in this post, though.

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Last Friday, we visited a small coffee farm owned and worked pretty much singlehandedly by a guy named Don Victor. He spoke no English, so our ecology professor translated as he showed us around his small farm and walked us through every step of the coffee process, from planting baby coffee trees to harvesting, drying, peeling, roasting, and blending the resulting beans.

Coffee is a major export in a number of Latin American countries, especially Colombia (think Juan Valdez) and Brazil, where massive corporate plantations of sun-grown coffee fill the countryside. In an attempt to carve out a quality-, not quantity-based niche for itself in the insanely lucrative global coffee market (it's the most valuable export commodity in the world), Costa Rica has chosen to regulate the plant pretty heavily. That regulation, combined with the harvest's heavy reliance on human labor over mechanization, means the big corporations active in this country are less attracted to the crop (Standard Fruit Company, et al much prefer pineapples and bananas - see this post). Here, most coffee is shade-grown by smaller farmers and cooperatives, and all of the coffee production I have had a chance to see thus far has been fairly sustainable and small-scale.

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Don Victor's farm fits the bill. His farm is only a few hectares big, all his cafe arabica coffee is shade grown, and his not perfectly straight rows of coffee trees tend to contour around plantain and banana trees he planted as well as a number of old-growth trees that he has left untouched. His wife is an orchid collector, which he doesn't complain about because the beautiful collection of terrestrial and epiphetic (they grow out of tree trunks) flowers attracts a diverse selection of wild bees that pollinate the coffee. Nearer to his house, Don Victor keeps a garden where he grows citronella, lemongrass, ragweed, mint, oregano, spearmint, and other coffee varieties like cafe gueycha, as well as a whole bunch of other things I couldn't scribble down quickly enough to catch. As a member of the Santa Elena Coffee Cooperative, during harvest he drives some of the harvested fruit to the Coop beneficio, or coffee processing facility, but he also runs his own mini production shop, drying, peeling, roasting, and blending coffee in his backyard.

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Shade grown coffee tastes a lot better than the alternative (so they tell me: I still haven't learned to like coffee at all), so the more sustainable production process is supported by the higher prices their coffee fetches within both the coffee aficionado and the fair trade/organic markets in Europe and the United States. The higher price not only helps coffee growers make a living wage: shade grown sustainable coffee creates corridors between otherwise disconnected forest segments, creates habitat for the dozens of species of migrant birds for whom Costa Rica is a pit stop, and absorbs carbon: two hectares of shade grown coffee absorbs as much CO2 as one hectare of old growth forest.

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That's a banana flower. Each of those tiny yellow flowers will become a banana.

Coffee is a commitment: unlike corn or soy, which you have to replant every year, it is an orchard crop; the same plant blooms every year. It takes about three years before a coffee plant is ready to produce its first salable fruits, so it's a big upfront investment. When the market takes a downward swing, farmers can't just up and plant another crop that will sell better, as they have invested years and years into creating ideal conditions for coffee variety they have been growing. When we visited his farm, Don Victor was in the process growing young saplings to replace some of his oldest and tiredest trees: they had been producing coffee for upwards of thirty years.

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baby coffee plants.

We also visited the beneficio (processing plant) of the Santa Elena Coffee Cooperative, of which Don Victor is a member. The Cooperative, a fair trade, organic coffee cooperative that exports high quality coffee to the United States using the Café Monteverde brand has been around for 19 years and is made up of 42 farms, all family owned. Through a partnership with some folks in Montana, they sell to a whole bunch of places in the US, as well as online.

The Cooperative runs training, community-building, and vocational programs for their members and their member's kids, and offers educational scholarships to help families pay for high school or college. It's an amazing, positive community, but it's not easy. Tying your own income to the production of 41 other families, especially in bad harvest years (and there have been a few recently) is a big risk, and some families decide to just go it alone. The coop has recently had to stop a few of its programs, such as recycling millions of discarded coffee bean skins as compostable coffee bags.

The cooperative, and everyone in this region who grows coffee for export, are faced with the same hard questions: How do you protect yourself and your family from far away market fluctuations you can't control? Does it make more sense to cut down half your farm and start growing something else in order to diversify? Selling your coffee at fair trade prices is the only way to make a decent wage, but what does it mean that that your neighbors could never afford to buy coffee from you? And, the question that seems to be on the mind of most of the farmers I have met in the last few weeks: What if my kids don't want to work the farm when I get older? What happens then?

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