Peter in Honduras

Seeing as it is Valentine’s Day, I suppose I should write about love in Honduras….

But I won’t.

Instead, I’ve got a great story from yesterday when I went up to Playón with my friend Jorge from the beneficio (coffee processing plant). Let’s go over the cast of characters, shall we?

We’ll start with the familiar. Jorge Aventura is one of the bosses at the beneficio where I got all that great coffee for Christmas. He’s the guy who hooked me up with it all and led me through the whole toasting process. Good guy.

Gringo: Self explanatory.

Moncho: So named because he is known to be gassy, according to the other guys. He is also known as Gordo.

Zorro: Not the sword fighter, it means fox in Spanish. Also known by his Christian name, Henry.

The gang started out as just me and Jorge as we left San Marcos around 3pm. I had arranged the day before to go out to Playón and see the farms and processing plant that his family owns up there. We hadn’t really discussed what we were going to do or what time, and so I figured he had forgotten when he called me at quarter to three.

So we’re heading up there and I ask him what we’re going to do. He tells me we’re going to see a couple of the fincas, drop off some tools and other materials, grab to days coffee harvest, and haul it to the beneficio humedo (wet coffee processing plant). Sounds good.

As it turns out, Café Playón is in the stages of getting Utz Kapeh certification, a environmental and social rights coffee certification process. This is something I’m familiar with from some of my earlier endeavors into coffee, but I had never actually seen anyone who was certified or pursuing certification. It was awesome, he took me on a tour of all the improvements they had made to the farms:

Signage everywhere- What to do in an emergency, how to deal with agro chemical spills, where not to put fertilizers (close to streams and marsh lands), bathrooms, kitchens, sleeping areas. Septic tanks for sewage waste, water treatment for the aguas mieles (water runoff from treating the coffee, contaminates water supplies), and much more.

After checking out the fincas (farms) we went on up to the beneficio. Check out the pictures for a better idea, but here there were farmers unloading thousands of pounds of coffee (still in the red fruit) and dumping it into the industrial sized de-pulper. This thing can process up to 16,000 pounds of coffee in a day without blinking an eye. So we dumped the sacks we had accumulated so far here and set off to go get the big load.

Enter Zorro and Moncho. Now the gang was complete. We met up with Zorro and Moncho who were on the side of the road guarding the 50-60 sacks of coffee (around 8000 pounds). Introductions were made. Since there were so many sacks, we took only half on the first run. Now, throwing 4000 pounds of coffee from the ground into a pickup truck is not an easy task. Zorro and Moncho manned the pickup bed and Jorge and I started heaving. Obviously the key is timing, and Jorge was quite practiced at giving the “ya” or “vamos” to signify the moment to heave had arrived. Moncho, as we will come to later, was less communicative. As Jorge and I tossed bag after bag over the side of the pickup bed, Moncho and Zorro went organizing it so that as much as possible would fit. We got about 25-30 sack into the back of the truck and went back to the beneficio.

Now we had to unload it and weigh it. Moncho and I got in the back of the truck and started tossing the bags from the truck to the loading dock. As I mentioned before, Moncho didn’t communicate too well. Don’t take that the wrong way, he’s a great guy, but he’s a guy who just knows how it’s done and figures everyone else should too. He was pretty skeptical at first that a gringo could even work with coffee. I insisted that he give me a shot. So at first we had a couple near misses were he would start to toss before I was ready or I would start to toss then slow down when I realized he wasn’t ready yet and we would lose the momentum and nearly drop 150 pounds of coffee. Pretty soon, though, we got a good rhythm down, acknowledged by a smile and a grunt from Moncho, only interrupted when he made a wrinkly “something smells bad face” and told me he had stepped in dog poop. I acknowledged this fact with a grimacing “I know the feeling” look. We were now friends.

We went back for the second load, then a third. My shoulders were getting tired. We swung by the pulperia (informal store in someone’s house) and grabbed some eggs, chorizo (ground pork), avocados, and Pepsi and went back to the beneficio. There was now a file of coffee in the holding area ready to be de pulped. I regret not taking a picture of this, but if you look at the other pictures of the pile when it was smaller, try to imagine the whole holding area full up to the short wall.

We left Zorro and the a couple of the other guys to supervise the depulping and headed for the cocina (kitchen, properly marked with a nice white sign). One of the doñas (older woman) had whipped up the ingredients we brought into a nice big dinner, eaten Honduran style. Again, I should have taken a picture, but I’ll try my best to describe:

On your plate: beans, eggs mixed with chorizo. You break off a hunk of dry cheese that’s on the table (I like to crumble it over my food). You put mantequilla (a thick heavy cream, like sour cream, but not sour) on top of your beans and a little on the side for later. Grab a slice of avocado. Spoon out some picked vegetables from the big glass jar on the table, making sure to get at least one jalapeño. There are no utensils, so you grab a tortilla and use that to scoop up food, eating your improvised utensil as you go. The trick here is to make sure you have enough of your last tortilla to scoop up the remaining food, otherwise you have to just slurp the food off the tortilla at the end and take really small bites of it so you don’t run out of “fork.”

Thusly filled, we set off back down the mountain at about 9pm. Zorro jumped off without me noticing, but we dropped Moncho off at his house and he gave me the campesino (rural farmer) handshake: touch fingers together in small handshake, no grabbing of the hand, fingers remain straight without grasping anything.

He asked if I was coming back.

I told him I was.

Check out new pics of my house at:

http://picasaweb.google.com/p.schlosser/NewHousePics

Yes, the life of a Peace Corps volunteer…

House facts:

Rent: $ 105
Utilities: Never gotten a bill
2Bd, 1 bath
Cocina amplia, pila grande, patio, porton, etc.

Constant electricity, no water from about 10am-3pm usually, but that’s why you have a pila (the big water storage tank). That extra bedroom is calling your name, come visit!