Eso es La Forma

Alright so I am sure you are all wondering what I have actually been doing for the past six months and no it hasn’t been just making furniture, playing with my machete or spending two months writing and editing my next blog entry. I have actually been working!

Pretty much the day I arrived, I started working on a large coffee project with my main organization, La Fundacion Colinas Verdes (Green Hills). This group is composed of five people who are dedicated to the development of the community of San Pedro de Vilcabamba and all the surrounding areas. They are a Non-Government Organization that receives all of their funding from outside organizations and right now all of their money is coming from Belgium and Spain. Along with the coffee project that started pretty much in mid-April, right when I arrived, they are also working on projects with a local flour product named Achira, soy bean cultivation, small animal production, irrigation, and teaching the local children about natural resource conservation.

So as you can tell there is no real shortage of work for me in my site. (I am also failing to mention that I am working with a women’s group to help them market their recycled paper cards and books, blog entry to come).

Getting back to our coffee project, it consisted of two major elements:

First, we held 4 different workshops for all of the local coffee growers which pretty much started the day after I arrived in my site. The workshops covered everything from the planting, pruning, harvesting, washing and drying of the seeds, and ultimately testing the quality of their coffee. Having these sessions upon my arrival helped to advance my Spanish and to give me the basic knowledge of the local coffee cultivation.



The second part of the coffee project was to make center based facilities in San Pedro and other neighboring farming communities, giving the coffee growers access to a greenhouse for the initial phases of growing the plants and a marquesina which is a small warehouse type building that is used solely for the drying of the coffee beans. The primary objective for these facilities is to both increase the amount of coffee produced and, through the use of new techniques and the drying facility, to improve the quality of the coffee produced.

To give you an idea of the progress we have made in the past 6 months, we completed each of the 4 workshops over a span of 3 months. We have made a total of 8 marquesinas for San Pedro de Vilcabamba and her surrounding communities and we are currently about 65% of the way done with the first of three greenhouses we are making.

This first greenhouse or vivero, is located in San Pedro, and is by far going to be our largest with a total of 25,000 coffee plants. This is where I have spent a majority of my time the past three months and below is an idea of all the work we have done there.

First we had to make the beds and planted the seeds that took about 4 months to mature in order for transplantation.

Next we had to clear the land to make the beds and shade structures for the bagged, transplanted plants. The shade structures are composed of thick bamboo posts holding up a roof of smaller bamboo stalks. These give the coffee plants the 60% sun, 40% shade ratio that they need for the best growing conditions. The beds we then dug out of the soil or made walls of wood in order to support the small, soil and plant filled plastic bags.

Then comes the fun part, collecting the parts for the soil and actually bagging it. In each bag is a mix of regular dirt, organic fertilizer (either pig manure or decaying sugar cane stalks) and sand. Each part we had to track down within the community, shovel it onto a truck and then shovel it back off at the greenhouse site. (Tractors/Front-End loaders just don’t exist so it is all done by hand). Then after we have huge piles of the three components we had to mix them into the soil for the plants, this mix consisted of four parts dirt, three parts organic fertilizer and two parts sand. And after it was thoroughly mixed together we got to bag these huge mounds of dirt into small little plastic bags that were about the size of coke can. The soil filled bags are then crammed into the beds and the small coffee seedlings are transplanted where they will grow for the next three months.

I know it seems like this is a fairly easy process but let me just re-iterate that we are doing 25,000 little soil filled bags, yes 25,000. To give you an idea of the timeframe we are talking, it takes about 3 days to collect each of the components for the soil, a day to mix it all and then each person can fill about 100 to 150 bags per day. For each mound of mixed soil I would say we get about 2,000 bags and this project started with just three of us doing it all. The first time we went through the entire process of gathering, mixing and then bagging the soil I was in good spirits. But after about the third time of doing it and seeing what little progress we were making I was starting to have my concerns that this was what I was going to be doing my entire Peace Corps term. I was at the point where one day, when we were tediously filling bags of dirt, I looked up at one of my counterparts and said to him(in Spanish), “You know, my service here as a volunteer probably could be better utilized doing something other than just filling bags of dirt for two years.” He understood and then mentioned to me that he didn’t want to bag all 25,000 plants either. He then mentioned that Colinas Verdes was in fact contacting all of the communities we had been working with and over the past 3 months we were setting up community work days where 7 or 8 of the coffee growers would come and fill bags of dirt for the entire day. This has proven to be a pretty effective strategy and right now we have approximately 15,000 bags filled with the mix and the seedlings and have more work days scheduled for the upcoming month to complete our goal of 25,000.

So that gives you a good idea of the work I have been doing over the past couple of months. Most of my days I was working with a shovel in my hand just chatting it up with either my co-workers or the local members of my community. But, nowadays I have been speaking with Colinas Verdes about starting some projects of my own and they are in agreement. The first goal I had was to find some new markets for the local coffee growers to sell their products. Right now they are only selling their coffee to one exporter about 2 hrs away and this exporter is offering a decent price but not the best. My recommendation to Colinas was to help the people find new avenues to sell their product, thus giving them the opportunity to get the best price possible for their coffee.

One idea we have is to start a small business where they would toast, grind and bag their own coffee and sell it to the local tourists for approx. $5-8 per lb (right now they make about $1.20 per pound). The plan is to implement this on down the road as we need to raise the funds for the equipment.

To find a more immediate fix to their distribution issues, I am helping by contacting other distributors/coffee toasters and grinders in Ecuador for the option of selling it to them rather than selling all of our product to just one place. And I am happy to say that through the contacts of the Peace Corps, I have been able to track down a new alternative for my community where our growers can make up to $50 more per sack of coffee. In our next harvest, we hope to increase my community’s coffee net income from approx. $49,000 to $70,000. This may not seem like a huge amount of money to you folks in the States but it will have a large impact on the well-being of the people of my community.

This entire experience has shown me how easy it is to have an effect on my community, whether through manual labor or through utilizing some of my business skills. In just my short time here I have already had a lifetime of experiences and am excited to see what else I can get done here in my next year and a half.

Other projects I am planning on helping Colinas Verdes with (I am sure others will arise on down the road):
Developing and implementing a marketing plan for their Achira flour product
Getting the coffee farms organically certified
Helping to solicit money and initiate their irrigation project