La Finca

Written 8/19/10

All week we have been working on our classrooms and, since mine’s not finished yet so I can’t decorate it, I’ve been working on curriculum and planning for the 7 classes I will be teaching (the students go to 9 classes every day that are 40 minutes long each). It’s been very relaxing and I have been able to get to know some of the other teachers better because of it. The other teachers are absolutely fantastic and more than willing to help you with anything. They are clearly really passionate about the students and genuinely good people, so I’m very excited to work with them all year!

Today after school Amelia and I went with Jake and our principal up to their coffee farm (called a “finca” here). A married couple that teach at our school, Mr. Perdomo’s (our principal) family and Jake’s family all bought this farm a few months ago. It is up in the mountains above La Unión and is really beautiful. It’s over 20 acres of coffee plants. It has a system set up to take the coffee seed out and clean the beans and a house on the front part of the property. As you hike up the mountain there’s also a small stream, some plantain trees and tons of beautiful scenery. They need to clear some of the land a bit more and cut some of the coffee plants that have grown to high, but there is a good amount of coffee on the plants. The harvest is in November and December, so I’m planning on heading up there with them to learn how to harvest coffee, and if I’m feeling especially motivated maybe I will help them clear off some land too. I figure if I want to get the true Honduras experience I need to learn how to pick coffee while I’m here!

While we were up there a storm was coming in, so you could just see the sheets of rain slowly making their way towards us, and it was so quiet and the surrounding mountains were so beautiful. It was like something out of a movie. Despite the slippery conditions due to the amount of rain we’ve been getting it was nothing short of breathtaking. They have plans to build a solar powered coffee dryer, small pond to raise tilapia in, re-vamp the house to have a guard or family live in during harvest time, raise some cows there and have a horse or two to get around the farm. There’s tons of land so all of that is definitely possible.

The finca is only about 15 minutes outside of town, so once we drove back Mr. Perdomo invited us over for coffee. He owns another farm further outside of town where he grows coffee, various vegetables and bananas and raises chickens, cows, etc, so the coffee we drank was from his farm and it was honestly one of the best cups of coffee I’ve ever had. I’m still trying to get used to drinking black coffee, but this was so smooth that I wouldn’t have wanted milk or sugar in it. He gave us a bag of coffee to take home, so we’re looking forward to having that. He also invited us up to his finca one weekend to get out of the city, although I don’t necessarily need to escape to a place smaller and more remote than La Unión).

We also learned a lot about coffee today. Apparently the workers who pick the coffee usually make about 25 lempiras per basket, which is about the size of a gallon container. That is somewhere around $1.30 per basket, which means that the pickers actually make really good money by La Unión standards, but they only make that money for a short period of time. Market value for coffee is about $1.50 a pound right now, so your profit margin isn’t that big unless you’re selling a lot of coffee or selling it to the US or other countries. There’s also a countrywide coffee tasting competition here and any farm can join. The winners usually get great accounts with the US, Europe, Japan or other big coffee buying countries. Apparently they want to be a part of the competition in a few years once they get the hang of things. Also, in Honduras a lot of times people roast their coffee over a fire, so sometimes the fire is perfect and the coffee comes out fantastic and other times the fire is too hot, or not hot enough, or doesn’t roast the coffee evenly and it doesn’t come out right. This causes a lot of people to ship the coffee before it’s roasted. I guess the longer you store coffee before you roast it the better it actually is. Lastly, Hondurans grind up their coffee really fine, like flour, which is much different than the coarsely ground coffee in the US.

Long story short, I learned a lot about coffee today and got to see some breathtaking scenery. Life is good here in sleepy La Unión.