The Taste of Many Mountains by Bruce Wydick

Author:Bruce Wydick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2014-05-31T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 18

Angela

ANGELA AND SOFIA SAT IN ONE OF THE TATTERED SEATS OF A chicken bus as it lumbered through the rugged western highlands, dropping elevation at nearly every turn, finally merging back on the Pan-American Highway. After weeks of helping Rich and Alex with interviews and gathering coffee production data in San Pedro Necta, one fact had become obvious: almost none of the profit made from some of the best arabica hard bean in the world was accruing to the cultivators of this premium coffee. They had interviewed hundreds of them. Most of these families lived huddled together in a single-room mud hut. Their children were malnourished and taken out of school to work, their families broken up through the economic necessity of migration. Nearly all of them lived in poverty or on the edge of it. Where were the coffee profits going?

While Rich and Alex continued to collect data from the growers, Angela and Sofia followed the coffee to the next link in the value chain: the headquarters of the fair trade cooperative Café Justicia in Guatemala City. There they would look for clues that might help them to understand where all the coffee profit was going.

They had learned from José-Ernesto that Café Justicia was one of the larger exporters of fair trade–certified coffee in Guatemala, collecting the coffee from its member cooperatives and selling it all over the globe. The office in the capital marketed the crop that its members harvested.

The bus arrived in Zone 5 of Guatemala City, a roughly hewn, rundown area, even by Guatemala City standards. Aged concrete buildings with faded paint lined the streets, their facades stained with years of exposure to fumes from diesel-belching buses. Few of the pedestrians on the streets wore the traditional Guatemalan clothing except for a few campesino women who apparently had come into the city to beg with their infant children. Compared with the rural charm of San Pedro Necta, they found the general atmosphere of the city to be dirty, crowded, and stressful.

Angela and Sofia walked several blocks from the bus station with their backpacks, following the crumbling sidewalks to the co-op headquarters. On top of its scruffy location, the office was not as nice as they expected for such a large operation. A burly security guard cradling a shotgun greeted them at the door and let them in. A young, professional-looking ladina woman at the reception desk regarded the backpacking students with a curious smile. After they explained their business, she invited them to have a seat in the waiting area and a cup of coffee from a pot that was brewing on a nearby table.

Sofia looked down into the sugar bowl. “Angela, have I shown you the special sugar additive we use in Latin America to fully enhance coffee flavor? Here, look . . .” Sofia mischievously opened the lid to the sugar bowl. Looking down, Angela saw that its contents resembled an ant farm with a rather breathtaking population density. Angela repressed a small scream, and they opted to take their coffee black.

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