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All of my ancestors lived in poverty
They all worked on the fincas
And left nothing for their children
I may live in poverty as well
Bur I hope that my children can harvest
The fruit of my labour here
And break the circle of poverty
The campesino Jose Abel. Worker in La Florida.
The adventure always starts with a journey and after being squashed with seventy other people on a bus designed for school kids, it was quite a ride. I shared half a seat with two fat ladies, squashed to my other thigh across the narrow aisle, was a gent also cursing the damn driver as we jerked and lurched our way to Colomba. It's a workout riding one of those things as you cling on in a desperate attempt to keep your butt attached to the seat. I was on a bus the other day whose seat actually left it's fixings and we were both catapulted up into the air from the shot suspension. The bus from Colomba was less occupied but they had rearranged the seats to fit more rows in and I couldn't sit with my knees straight out. This is the chicken bus mentality, pack 'em in, be it man, woman or beast and then take corners as fast as your clapped-out engine will allow you.
The bus dropped me off at a rusty old sign at the end of a dirt path. I was met by my guide Elverice, who had kindly taken his top
off to greet me bare chested. Half an hour later we arrived at the Finca, a dilapidated looking farmyard and houses set down one main street. My bed was a wonderful straw-sprung mattress in the volunteer house. The old house once belonged to the patron but I imagine lacked grandeur, even in it's glory days. The rooms have creaky old beds and a couple of cupboards. The verandah is the place to hang out at the end of a hard day on hard chairs round an old table. At night we sit by candle-light to read as our room is at the end of a bad circuit.
Each volunteer has a family with which they eat three meals a day. Monica, Flori and their multitude of children/grandchildren made me very welcome. With the most primitive surroundings and the most basic of ingredients, they made some very tasty meals and I learnt a lot about edible local plants and cooking methods.
I spent my first afternoon learning to make tamales in their smoky little kitchen. The usual tortilla mix was seasoned with oil, salt, bouillon and a packet of monosodium glutamate. A paste was made by mincing bread, dried
chillis, soaked rice, roasted onion and tomato, then they added some pre-cooked Flor de Ezote (a palm flower) and a hacked up cooked chicken carcass, bones n' all. To create the tamale; pat out a tortilla shape, add some sauce to the centre and fold it up into a little parcel without splitting the sides, harder than it looks. Then wrap in a greased banana leaf, stack up ina big pot, add a bit of water and steam. Stodgy as they are, they're pretty tasty and even better crisped up over the griddle for breakfast.
I found out why piles of rocks are for sale on the market - this is 'cal'. They grind it down and use a powder solution to create a non-stick surface on the griddle used for cooking tortillas. Though, the main use is to add calcium to the water when boiling maize for tortillas, this helps break down the hard kernel at the bottom of the grain. The grains are boiled every night and the women get up at 4.00am every morning to use the communal machine that grinds the corn to a paste. Formerly, or when without the electric, they use a stone
grinder, traditionally the kitchen gadget of choice for thousands of years in Latin America. Why so early? The men go out to work at 5.00am and can't start the day without their trusty tortillas at breakfast.
Power is an issue, they have an unreliable hydroelectric plant that runs from a small stream; lights are only bright when it rains a lot. Some people have a TV which thay can only watch in the rainy season. There are no refrigerators here, everything is cooked fresh, or stored warm. Radios are all battery powered, and some families rig bulbs up to car batteries for extra light. It sounds eco-friendly, though they make a deep carbon footprint by using wood-fired stoves and burning plastic waste.
The first day or so here is totally disorientating, everyone is friendly and keen to know your name but the sea of faces is bewildering. Forty familes live here with their 100 children, that's a lot to remember! But
'poco a poco' it comes together and you begin to fit into your surroundings as you learn to relax into the rythymn of life here.
The first morning I spent with Heidi and the others in
Sorting coffee beans with Albertina
After a week of eye straining sorting, I shall not be taking a cup of mocha lightly anymore! chopping firewood with a machete. This was ace until a blister appeared on my chopping hand. Having seen so many people carrying cargo by a strap accross their foreheads, I was keen to give it a go. It's one of those things that kids and geriatrics make look easy; after years of training their neck muscles are able to take the load. For the rest of us, it really is an awful pain in the neck and one I would gladly do without again!
Apart from collecting firewood and de-graining corn cobs, the main task here is the cultivation of organic coffee. I'd just missed picking season by a few days, they are just harvesting the last berries; robusto, used as seed. After this they will prune the bushes to ensure a good harvest next year. I spent a lot of time on the patio sorting grains of pergamino; the dried grains with the inner husk still attached, containing the precious 'cafe oro'. The 'bad' grains still have the dark outer husk attached, are too yellow, have insect holes or are too young and have only formed one bean. It's a labour intensive process and will make
Baking bread
The girls ran the panaderia as a way of making money for the co-operative. Though since buying the ingredients was difficult, they only baked once a fortnight. me think twice next time I drink a cup! The 100lb sacks of organic beans are sold for about 60 GBP, currently to a Dutch company, though the price of coffee fluctuates daily.
A small cash crop are the macadamia nuts, sold for less than 50p a pound. I spent one morning hunting down the conker-like nuts among dead leaves in El Campo. Removing the outer shells from these buggers was a thumb sore three hours. Smash the husk gently with a rock and prise off, the hazel conker is the tasty prize. Float these is a tub of water to pick off the bad ones and roast in the sun for two hours.
Every two weeks or so three girls will prepare bread for sale in the panaderia, a great effort with limited resources. The wood-fired oven is lit at 6.00am in preparation of the days baking. It takes two hours to heat, the embers are spread all over the floor of the over to ensure even heat. Small palm trees are used as brushes to clean out the ashes before baking. Everything is weighed, mixed, rolled and shaped on one aluminimum table. Watching Evelyn make a
Clara Luz making tortillas
Her house is an old workshop that was used for processing honey. It still has a large metal vat where the honey was stored. 30 egg cake batter by hand, using only the flour-well method was pretty amazing and just goes to show we don't really need our electric whisks, or even our basins and wooden spoons. They make mainly sweet bread, some French bread (not like we know it), biscuits and banana and chocolate cake. Everything is sold at 75 centavos, the profits are really only enough to buy the next batch of ingredients but having fresh bread was a treat for everyone and good training for the girls.
Days here are structured by mealtimes and bedtime comes soon after the sun goes down. After
almuerzo you can hunt for more work, perhaps preparing food wikth your family, play with the kids or do your washing and read a book. Don Clemente and Clara Luz were my next 'family', their two girls had long since left home and had children of their own. I really warmed to them, the best bit was the break from entertaining kids, instead they had a menagerie of animals. Paco the parrot was an angry green parakeet who sat above the kitchen door swearing at people. The dogs were Rocky, Pirata and Fanny; who had a little
perroito, now named after my dog George. On the avian front, they had two doves, two turkeys, four chickens and a clutch of chicks. My favourite was Chepi the little ginger cat, who would snuggle in my lap and purr his appreciation.
Clara had been born at Neuva Austria, an adjacent Finca, and lived their all her life until she met Clemente, a visiting labourer on the coffee crop. It was love at first sight and they were married within 15 days of knowing each other. They moved to Palmira, a neighbouring farm but when work dried up there they travelled about working at different plantation before eventually forming part of the founding group of La Florida. I walked with Clara through the coffee plantations to visit her sister in Palmira. On the way we sampled the furry sweet fruit of seed pods and inspected edible leaves. Palmira and Pensamiento are small farming communities thought the land here is owned by the president, the residents work on his land as well as a plot of their own. Hence they are visibly better provisioned for; bigger houses, a dentist, proper shops, a small weekly market and access to mains electricity.
Whether the 400 families are better off is a matter of debate, personally I wold prefer the community spirit of La Florida. Clare thinks that farming without the co-operative is better because some people don't pull their weight. Though she cannot work because of an illness and Clemente has a bad heart and mainly drives his truck, so how they would fare without the co-operative is questionable.
School term had just started and the kids were pretty excited to go back. The youngest went in the morning and the juniors in the afternoon. I realised why when I saw the size of the school and the amount of kids squashed in three basement rooms with one teacher between them. This teacher was government funded but a stretched resource with 100 kids to contend with. They need another for the afternoons but this would cost 900 Quetzales a month, money they simply haven't got.
Albertina related the story of the Finca to us...which goes something like this..
Our struggle for land in the area of Colomba has been long and hard.
The first initiative to form a union was made in 1984, a dangerous time to form Cacao seeds
The seeds were left overnight to slightly ferment and improve the flavour. They were dried on the patio, the white pulp turns into a crispy skin. Roasted over an open fire until the beans and skin are black, then grind twice through a table-top mincer with sugar. Ready to eat, or mix with hot water a drink! Not quite adburys but amazing to make it! a union, as any attempt by people to organize themselves could be seen as guerrilla activity which would lead to immediate execution.
We formed the organization hoping to improve the hopeless situation in which we lived. The normal daily wage was about 25 Quetzales for men and 12 for women, but dueños often didn´t pay what they promised. Violations of the women were not uncommon either.
With the signing of the peace accords in 1996 we gained fresh hope along with the rest of the country, especially since the government promised to decrease the unequal distribution of the land existing as long as Spanish has been the official language in Guatemala.
Unfortunately, our hope didn´t last for long because governments after the accords didn´t grant our demands either.
Tired of these repeatedly broken promises, we, the members of SCIDECO, went out on October 10, 2002 and peacefully occupied the abandoned finca ´La Florida´. We demanded that the government buy it, as they received large sums of money from international organizations to do so.
It was a plan made by a desperate group of people who saw no other way to improve their standard of living
and give their sons and daughters a better future.
For more than two years we lived in houses made of bamboo and plastic, facing a deep poverty and in constant fear of the police and hired gunmen.
At the same time our organization gained strength, and we organized ourselves on a national level as the ´Plataforma Agraria´ and ´Manos Campesinas´.
On May 28, 2005 the government accepted our demands and granted us a 6.5 million Quetzales loan (USD $850,000) to buy the land. We have 8 years to pay the debt, which is not much time considering the amount of money we owe. We hope that with a lot of hard work and help from ´compañeros extranjeros´ we will be able to pay the debt and set an important example for the rest of the landless and repressed population of Guatemala.
Finca La Florida The people here are unbelievably welcoming despite their hardships. You have to marvel at their strength and resilience and sense of community. I think it is the team work and support for each other that makes them strong. Some Westerners may view this as the perfect lifestyle, living from nature's larder and
working for a common goal, though things aren't as perfect as they appear. Underneath the the surface there is a lot of grief and a lifetime of oppression. 56 year old Albertina is bringing up her 4 year old niece whose mother died in childbirth. Many children here are brought up without fathers. There is a 'two strikes and you're out rule', where a violent husband will be expelled after two chances. In general, drinking is not acceptable. Some teenagers rebel and hang around smoking at night. But they have come this far and it takes a long time to alter the past...poco a poco, they will break the cycle of history.
I wish them luck and will always remember the two weeks I spent as part of their lives...
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Amy
non-member comment
Very interesting to come across this entry, while looking for photos to send home to Pennsylvania of pacaya. We just cooked some, actually from La Nueva Florida, envuelto en huevo, for our dinner! We go to La Florida occasionally, as we have some Guatemalan friends there. Sounds like the same place - after Colomba, wind down and then back up a gorge to arrive at the Finca, right? The carefully done by hand stone roads are all torn out, in preparation to pave the whole entrance through the gorge. I don't recognize any of the names in your post. I only know a handful of folks there.