Coffee Finca

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my teacher this week is also a psychologist and has a medical clinic and pharmacy in
the downstairs of her house, so we went to visit yesterday...there were no patients to see, but we stayed a while to make tortillas. this afternoon we took a chickenbus to a neighboring town and then rode in the back of a pickup up the mountain into the cloud forest to soak in some natural hot springs. it was amazingly beautiful with the steam rising over the green, green, green.

last weekend we went to visit some undeveloped mayan/olmec ruins down closer to the coast called takalik abaj or abaj takalik depending on who you ask...they were featured in may 2004 national geographic if it happens to be laying around. they were pretty neat although the national geographic makes them look much more mysterious and romantic. When you were actually there, the guide would say "and on your left you will see a great pyramid" and then we would look and there would be a big grassy knoll with a few steps. He would then proceed to encourage us to have our country send money to excavate them, so we can actually see the great pyramid. This speech happened a good half dozen times. However, there was a lot of really unique massive rock carvings...a few things like no other site.

we also visited a coffee finca...when we decided on the trip to the finca it was advertised as "you'll never buy anything but free trade again" Naturally we believed this was going to be a nice little visit to a free trade coffee farm, but in fact the idea was to horrify us by showing us the opposite. Or at least that's what we decided. When we first drove up it was pretty impressive, the owner had arranged a full lunch for us at the guest house/formal dining room. He was not around, but it was quite the spread. The food was excellent, all the walls were decorated with antiques...even the dishes were fancy. but it was pouring down rain and we waited it out on the covered porch. I wandered in to the front garden I noticed that the owner had self excavated and moved some ancient ruins into a little arrangement in the front of the house. It was the same continuation of the mayan/olmec ruins as we had just visited earlier that day. Only at the other site it they were great measures to preserve and maintain them...After lunch we wandered towards the back of the finca. it had 26 families living and working on it, their living conditions were very sad...it looked like something out of one of those commercials where they try to get you to sponsor a child. Small cement houses with too many people living in them, no electricity or running water, garbage everywhere...most of the families, and especially the children had never left the compound. They were paid barely close to nothing and owned nothing...they had to rent their cement houses from the landlord, and buy food from him. He owned them and they were stuck there. They were born in debt and would never work out of it. I remember walking down the path in front of the houses, sharing and umbrella with Mia. About a hundred children came out the houses and stared at us as we walked. We smiled and waved, but as we continued down the path passing their dirty faces and shanties, I couldn't help but be embarrased and shamed by my clean clothes, and even the frivolous umbrella. I wanted to throw it, and stop living the way I was living. And I wanted to come back and give them all a little medical care and their childhood vaccinations. It made me want to cry.

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