7:51am - The sun is already higher in the sky than in Boston at noon.
8:37am - We pass another elementary school with barbed wire. Reminds me of the one I saw yesterday called Happy Days Kindergarden! that was surrounded by high walls, barbed wire, and iron gates. Good walls might make good neighbors, but great walls mean terrible ones.
We arrived in another small town in the eastern part of the country. The main organization we visited is called COMUS and organizes local corn, bean, and coffee producers in seven of the surrounding towns. We got to see all aspects of the coffee production, and the end production of the beans and corn (the beans and corn quality control and distribution are funded by the U.N.'s World Food Program). We stopped at five different sites to hear from the executive members. Javier and I were translators again for the course of 5 or 6 hours straight—I'm pretty exhausted from all that mental activity, but it was still so fascinating.
The coffee producers are doing the best they can, but a blight is spreading rapidly through Central America (la roya). This does give incentives to try to grow coffee, since it's just becoming more and more a cash crop from decreased supply and worldwide increase in demand. But between blight, drought, and flooding, there are so many forces out of the farmers' control. When everything goes well, though, the process is like organic clockwork. This is what we caught a glimpse of today. The hard and soft outer shells from the coffee beans are mulched into organic fertilizer which is used to grow more beans. The finished ground coffee is sold locally. There's essentially no waste in the coffee production cycle.
The main organization, COMUS, was started in 1990 during the civil war. Originally a group focused on human rights and private property for rural communities who had no one to turn to, after the war it reorganized itself around economic development and social change. Its founder was killed in a car accident in '97, and his son is continuing his father's work. After 25 years, COMUS now deals with 2,000+ local food producers. They are in the process of marketing their products both nationally and internationally to individuals and public institutions alike. It is a long road.
I got to talk with Javier, Rutilio (our microfinance guide and ridiculous photographer), and Oscar (van driver) at lunch. They taught me a bunch of Salvadoran Spanish. My favorite is definitely "echar la araña" which literally means "to throw the spider". However, this phrase metaphorically means "to go pee". How this metaphor works, we'll never know. Took me a while to figure out they weren't pulling my leg.
A poster in the COMUS office... In Catalan! Apparently a group from Barcelona comes in August.
Photo of the organization's founder during the civil war. He's the grizzled man on the right. I'm not sure if the child is his son.
Here's a song by a band called Bacilos that I've really been jamming out to down here:
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