by Anneka Kmiecik, Birchwood Café

I work in a café. Mostly the am shift. to be exact. And every morning the people come in. The sleepy ones, eyelids drooping and last night’s dreams still hovering at their mind’s edge. The hurried ones, cars impatiently waiting outside, eager to zoom off. The leisurely ones with a paper or book tucked under an arm, sizing up the open tables for a sunny window or favorite spot. The friends, getting together for a chat and companionship and some laughs. The business people, popping open briefcases, painting the tables white with papers and plans. And me, behind the counter, taking orders and watching the parade.

So many different folks, knowingly or unknowingly, tied together by their morning coffee. Maybe it’s a skinny lattè. Or maybe a large Sumatra, room for cream please. Or maybe a double short cap. It doesn’t really matter the form it takes because at the heart it all originates in a tiny bean, the heart of a bright red cherry. And just as all of us in this small, south Minneapolis café are linked by these little beans, so too do these little beans with our awareness of it or no, connect us to the far away farmers growing our coffee.

It’s rare to get the opportunity to make that most basic connection, thousand of miles away, with those farmers. But sometimes, incredible opportunities arise. Recently I had the luck to travel to Nicaragua with members of Peace Coffee to visit small coffee growers and learn about the work and processes involved in coffee production. After a week in Nicaragua, I returned home with my bags full of coffee, gifts, and rolls of film and my head full of thoughts and questions. Our seven brief days and the people who populated our time in Nicaragua taught me much.

So now that I’m home, I sit on my sofa sifting through the memories of my travels, looking to share and expand on what I learned. But where to begin when there’s so much to talk about? I sit and my mind is full of thoughts – thoughts on the nature of poverty and struggles for land; on the hopes of the Fair Trade movement; on the devastation IMF and World Bank economic models bring to countries like Nicaragua, the poorest in Central America; thoughts on colonialism, brutal dictatorships, oppression and the dreams of revolutions; on the faces and lives we forget exist because they’re somewhere else; on the promises and cruelties of globalization; on the links between us all. So many thoughts, too many to write about in any one article. And so I find myself returning to that little coffee bean which is inextricably woven through all these thoughts. And I decide that today I would like to write just a little about what I observed and learned in Nicaragua about coffee.

Coffee, after oil, is the world’s most traded commodity. And yet, in the United States most of us know very little about how coffee is produced, who is producing it and how the different producers are paid. For me, having a company in the Twin Cities such as Peace Coffee has helped increase my knowledge of issues surrounding coffee. Through Peace Coffee’s work many people are exposed to the ideas behind Fair Trade, organic and shade-grown coffee. My trip to Nicaragua was another step towards self-education and awareness of coffee’s position in the world.

Traveling to Nicaragua was very special. It is one thing to read about something, it is quite another to talk with people first hand, briefly witness their lives and see the actual road Nicaraguan coffee travels from ripe cherry to hulled bean ready for export.

Fair Trade promises, well, fair trade – a buying and selling of goods without profiteering middlemen and with respect for human dignity and worth as manifested in fair prices allowing producers and workers a decent , sustainable life. Meeting Nicaraguans and staying in a community re-reminded me of the importance of the small extra price we pay for Fair Trade goods. I realized something else on my trip – we do not often see the huge amount of energy which goes into bringing us coffee.

To begin with, there is the labor of Nicaraguan families. Each small and medium coffee grower has their plot of land which they care for and plant. A grower’s harvest depends not only on the weather but the time and resources which she or he is able to put into the plants. All the work is done by hand from pruning the surrounding trees to provide adequate sun for the coffee to making organic fertilizer for organic plants. From harvesting the mature cherries to wet mill processing when the coffee is de-pulped and fermented. Even once the coffee leaves the growers’ communities work still continues with much manual labor. At Cecocafen’s dry mill, SolCafé, workers must constantly tend the coffee drying on the huge outside patios. Inside the mill, heavy bags of coffee are dragged and dumped into hulling machines by the men while a long roomful of women sit at conveyor belts for eight hour shifts sorting the bad from the good coffee beans. And none of this takes into account the labor of planting new coffee trees (with the three to five years it takes for trees to begin producing), Or, say, tending the rest of one’s crops so that one’s family is fed for the year. But that isn’t the end of the energy that goes into bringing us coffee. There is also the work involved in moving the coffee from remote, mountainous areas to SolCafe in Matagalpa and the work involved in shipping that coffee from Nicaragua to Europe and the United States.

In Matagalpa, for the first time, I really stopped to think about all the work that goes into making my morning cup of coffee. All the work that so many people walking in and out of a little southside café probably forget about too. Suddenly, the price we pay for cup of coffee seems unrealistically low. Maybe, if I stretch my thoughts even farther, I pay unrealistic prices for many more items I consume. It’s something I need to contemplate, perhaps we all need to contemplate. My experience in Nicaragua, all that I learned about coffee reminded me to make the time to contemplate and question. As important as anything else I carry from that trip, I carry the words and hopes of the people I talked with and the beauty and richness of a country which exhort us all to never stop seeking, thinking and striving to find common connections and better our world.

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