The Colinas Verdes Foundation (www.colinasverdes.org)

Upon my site assignment by the staff of Peace Corps Ecuador I had no idea what to expect with my counterpart agency: The Colinas Verdes Foundation. As most of you have probably heard, one of the largest frustrations of Peace Corps volunteers is the lack of work or of people willing to work but fortunately that was not the case with my organization.

Colinas Verdes was started in the mid 1990´s by a husband and wife from the United States who wanted to create a Non-Government Organization (NGO) to help preserve Podocarpus National Park and its surrounding area. In its first couple of years the foundation participated in projects that revolved around water and watershed conservation as well as land and forest preservation.

Nowadays the Colinas Verdes Foundation is run by a team of Ecuadorians from the area (the American couple had to return to the US to get jobs to pay for their kids´ college education). The focus of the organization has also changed a bit too going from a conservation based group to more of a development agency.

How it works is the people of Colinas Verdes solicit funding from development organizations from all over the world. To solicit the money they need to write an in-depth proposal with a budget that is specific down to the penny. Then once they are awarded the money they have to be constantly reporting their progress usually on quarterly basis until the project is finished.

Since I arrived in San Pedro de Vilcabamba, two years ago, we have worked on all kinds of projects, big and small. The projects we worked on ranged from everything to irrigation systems, school gardens and small animal breeding.

The largest project we have been involved in since my arrival has been the coffee project. Back in 2008 the Colinas Verdes Foundation received funding from an organization called Manos Unidas (United Hands) which is based in Spain and the project was designed to help the local coffee growers from all over southern Ecuador in a number of different ways. Below are the major components of the project.

1. Organize the Coffee Growers: Just over a year ago the coffee growers of the Vilcabamba Valley were all working individually, selling their coffee to local distributors who were taking advantage of these poor farmers by paying them extremely low prices. Our first priority with Colinas Verdes was to help with the creation of La Asociación Agroartesanal de Productores Ecológicos de Café Especial del Cantón Loja (APECAEL). This organization has given the coffee growers the structure and power needed to get a better price in the coffee market and enables them to do things such as get organically certified in the future.

2. Coffee Nursery: Within the city limits of San Pedro de Vilcabamba the Colinas Verdes Foundation has a small parcel of land and with the funding from Manos Unidas we have been able to raise and give away over 50,000 coffee plants these past two years. This part of the project is enabling the local coffee growers to plant more coffee and replace older, non-producing plants. Thus helping them to increase the quantity of coffee grown to supply to huge demand for Ecuadorian coffee (They produced 17k sacks of coffee last year and the demand was for 30k).

3. Coffee Support Centers: One of the main problems in the history of Ecuadorian coffee is the post-harvest processing of the coffee. In the past (and still today many growers use this process) it was the custom to pick the berries, dry them on a cement pad out in front of their house and then sell it to the local coffee buyer. Unfortunately with this process the coffee is absorbing the acids from the berry and being contaminated by all the dust, chickens, dogs…etc that are walking all over the drying coffee. In an effort to improve the quality of coffee these small farmers are producing , we have been building ¨support centers¨ which consist of a de-pulping machines, washing and fermentation tanks and large drying racks thus giving the farmers the ability to produce ¨café lavado¨ or washed coffee. The process involved in washing coffee is basically de-pulping it from the berry, then fermenting it to remove the sticky coating, washing it and then drying the coffee in a clean environment.

Over my two year stint here we have successfully made 16 of these support centers for the coffee growers to process their harvest and thus improved the quality of the coffee they produce, getting them a better price with buyers.

4. ¨Field Days ¨ : The last aspect of the coffee project for the Colinas Verdes Foundation were the field days we would have with the farmers. These field days were meetings we set up with the small groups of growers where we traveled out to their farms and taught them about composting, organic herbicides and pesticides, combating plagues and how to prune their coffee. I really enjoyed these days because it enabled us to see these people´s farms as well as really get to know these folks personally.

Well that about sums up most of the work we have been doing over the past two years. I have to say that I have been extremely lucky to work with an NGO as organized and driven as the Colinas Verdes Foundation. Most volunteers have found themselves yearning for work or something to do and I am happy to say that that was not the case with me. The team at Colinas Verdes is a great group of people and I have been truly blessed to have them as my co-workers and friends over the past two years.