Storytelling - Meet a young coffee farmer

          The following are the experiences of Bolivia’s women coffee farmers in this time of new opportunity and difficult change.  Ester Julia Quispe is an imaginary (though typical) indigenous woman coffee farmer.  Her story is based on the compilation of real data, experiences and stories.  Ester Julia Quispe is 18 years old.  She came to Caranavi as a baby on her mother’s back.  Her mother and father had moved do the area from Sorata.  Her father worked in the mines there, but it was dangerous work.  The family was looking for a new life and so they came to the Yungas.  Twice in her life, Ester traveled with her family back to Sorata, eight hours away, and visited her grandma and aunts and cousins.  It is different living on the high, cold altiplano.  Ester prefers Caranavi, though she does like traveling through the city of La Paz there is so much happening there.  Ester’s mother convinced her one aunt to move the region.  She and her husband live just down the road from Ester, so does her father’s mother.  Ester’s father is part of Union Pro-Ago one of the larger coffee associations in the area.  She remembers when there was no coffee and the family grew coca.  It was easy to pick the leaves to dry and sell them in the local market.  They were light and the bushes were not very high.  Coffee was different.  She needed a pole to bend down the branches to pick off the guinda or cherry.  She could only pick the red ones and as they filled her bag, it became heavy.  Then she had to grind them through the de-pulper machine and let them set before spreading them out to dry on the high tables.  It was a lot of work.  They still grew coca in the summer,  coffee was a winter crop, but not as much as before.

Her parents want her to marry and have her own farm but she does not want to do that yet.  She tends to her plot of coffee though often she does not weed it enough or harvest in time and her coffee is not that good and the birds eat it.  She spends her days helping at the coffee association, Pro-Agro with Cecilia.  She likes to keep track of the orders and is learning accounting from Cecilia, another coffee farmer who took accounting classes at an institute in La Paz.  Her mother calls her lazy when she sees the meager coffee coming from her daughters’ plot and her former classmates laugh.  “How can you be working at Pro-Agro when you have no coffee?” they tease her.  Most classmates she does not even see anymore, just at the soccer tournaments against the other colonies or at market in the town of Caranavi on Wednesdays.  It was a long time since she was in school.  The local school only went to eighth grade and her parents did not want to send her to the high school in Caranavi almost two hours away.  Now with the new laws it was different all parents had to send their children to school or they would loose their end of the year stipends $300 to cover the costs of school supplies and uniforms for the year. 

Ester has three brothers and a sister.  Juan was almost 20 and wanted to go to La Paz to study business administration but his father said that he needed to stay and help with the farm.  He wants Juan to be a farmer like the sons of the other members of Pro-Agro.  All of the fathers are pushing for their sons to get more land and farm in the Yungas like they did.  Juan wants to do other things.  His cousin Harry went to Argentina and works in a factory making t-shirts for $200 a month.  Juan wants to go to Argentina with Harry next time he comes back to visit (fig. 1).

(Fig. 1) Home for a vacation.  (Photo: Stenn, 2012)

Twenty-year-old Juan Jose (Pepe) Alanoqa, the son of coffee farmers, home from his clandestine work in a Buenos Aires, Argentina clothing factory.  He is an undocumented worker and spends about 60 hours a week, making about $.83 an hour, take-home pay.  He is housed and fed at the factory.  With few expenses, and little time to spend his earnings, Pepe saves almost $200 a month.  He feels the work, though tiresome, is worthwhile because he is saving money, meeting new people, and building a future for himself.  He says the food is good and he even has an Argentinean girlfriend who works in the same factory.  Each year, thousands of Bolivians cross the borders to work in factories in Argentina. This is Pepe’s first time back in over a year.  The factory closed for winter vacation.  He will be returning to Argentina in just a few days.  It is a three day tip by bus. Half of Pepe’s vacation time was spent traveling. He is not sure if he will come back to farm coffee.  Right now he is enjoying Argentina and his work.  He makes almost as much as his parents do in a year.

Her sister Lourdes is 16 and always teasing the boys.  She dreams of living on her own coffee farm, having children, and being like her mom.  “That’s what everyone does,” she tells Ester, when Ester questions her on why she does not want to do something more.  Ester finds this dull and boring, why would anyone just want to sit on a farm all day she asks?  Ester’s mom wants to know why Ester is always so ambitious, why can’t she just be calm and little by little with the farming life gets better.

Little Jack is eight and never sits still.  He is always running after his soccer ball and kicking it at the chickens.  Life is just one big game for him.  Her aunt calls him the diablito, little devil.  His grandmother is always giving him extra oranges and sweet fruits to eat.  He’s a good coffee picker though and often picks as much as his big sister, Lourdes.

Baby Emma is six and just starting school.  She walks to the two-room schoolhouse with her brother each morning.  They sit at tables in rows and copy what the teacher draws on the board.  They go home for lunch and help with coffee if it is coffee season.  She likes her class.  And teacher.  There are 15 other students in it. (Fig. 2).

(Fig. 7)  A coffee farmer stands by her nursery. (Photo: Stenn, 2012)

Coffee seeds are protected from the sun and animals while being maintained in a humid environment under a low tent of ferns.  Being germinated during the winter dry season, this coffee nursery needs to be hand watered each day.  Taking three months to germinate, coffee seedlings grow slowly, reaching coffee producing maturity after five years.  A plant will produce coffee for 10 years.  There is an ongoing rotation of old and new coffee plants and the use of nurseries to maintain a steady supply of new plants.  Coffee earnings have doubled since Fair Trade come to the region 10 yeas ago besides maintaining their current production, farmers are expanding their coffee plots.

She remembered that her mother had some other children between Lourdes and Jack but they died.  That was a bad time when there was a lot of water problems, the health post was not set up yet and the dengue fever came.  She remembered being sick often.  Now with their latrine things seem to be better.

 Esters’s family lives together in their two room adobe home.  One room is for storage and the farming equipment, machetes, the de-pulper, food sacks with rice and the other is where they all live.  Sometimes Juan sleeps in a hammock but mostly they share the three beds.  Sleeping head to toe.  She sleeps with Lourdes.  Sometime Emma climbs in too.  Their house has a dirt floor and they just got a solar panel.  Now there is light in the evenings.  The children use it to do their homework.  Her mother speaks of buying a television, though they would need a tall antennae too.  They listen to the radio and she helps Jack with his math homework.  The kitchen does not have electricity though.  She cooks there with her mother, pealing potatoes and making soups with yucca and chicken.  Sometimes there is no meat and they just eat the soup with vegetables.  There is always fruit; mangoes, oranges, bananas, avocados.  The family will harvest these to sell at market too.  Ester likes going to the market.  It is a fun time to run into old friends from school and see what is happening in the outside world.  That is when she will stop by the Pro-Agro offices in town and look for Cecilia.  Cecilia understands how Ester wants to do something more than farm.

There are new leadership training programs from FECAFEB that Celica tells her about.  Soon the women will be able to be members of the coffee associations too, not just have a membership through their husbands like most did.  They would be invited to attend the coffee meetings and expected to speak and participate.  The leadership training classes will help them to prepare for this and teach them they will be able to make decisions and learn how things work in the association.

Ester begins the day helping her brothers and sisters get ready for school while her mother makes the morning tea and heats up last night’s soup.  After the children have eaten, she will sweep the area and gather up clothes for her mother to wash.  Her mother likes washing clothes, she says he swish swish of the water calms her nerves.  Este thinks it’s all of the years her mother spent in the Altiplano without much water that makes her like water so much.  After she sweeps the dirt floors and makes the beds, Ester gathers wood for the cooking fire and makes lunch.  She sits on a low wooden stool on the dark kitchen’s dirt floor, feeding small sticks into the adobe stove that is build on the floor, holding up a blackened aluminum pot. 

The coffee season runs from May until August.  During these months, Ester raises even earlier, eating a quick 5am breakfast before going out with her father and Juan to pick coffee from the family’s 12 acre plot from 6am until 10am.  Then she will return to cook lunch for the family, eat and clean, and spread out last night’s fermenting coffee on the drying tables to dry for the day (fig. 3).  Her brother and sister return from school for lunch.  Ester and her entire family head out to the fields from 2pm to 6 or 8pm to pick even more coffee.  On a good day, she picks about three lattas of coffee cherries (60 pounds).  They return home, de-pulp the coffee by hand grinding it in a mill that removes the fleshy fruit, leaving just the bean, and leave the beans to ferment over night.  Then they eat dinner and prepare for bed.

(Fig. 3)  Maria Elena Hilari drying her coffee. (Photo: Stenn, 2012)

Once hand de-pulped and fermented over night, wet coffee beans are spread out on low, net covered tables for drying.  The nets let air circulate underneath, drying the coffee more evenly and quickly.  The raised tables keep the coffee off the ground, provides a space for air circulation, and keeps dust and animals out. The drying process is important in maintaining the quality of the bean.  Women stay close to the houses when their coffee is drying so they can check the readiness of the bean.  When it is dry enough, as indicated by the bean color, the coffee is put into 220 pound (1 quintal) sacks for the association(Union Pro-Agro) to trnsport to la paz for a second drying.  Maria Elena has a red tub of poor quality beans she hand selected from the coffee on the ground to her right.  Once in la paz, coffee is graded and a price assigned by the FECAFEB to each family.

Sometimes her father is at a meeting, or traveling to El Alto, La Paz to oversee the coffee drying facility they are installing there.  Sometimes Ester travels to La Paz with him.  It is exciting to be out in such a different world.  She likes the drying facility too.  The big equipment is exciting and scary.  They are still installing it so she is not sure how it will work yet.  She helps to rake the beans on the large, cement drying patio.  Each community has their own elected supervisor who travels to El Alto to stay with the community’s beans while they dry.  Ester has on a winter coat on and wraps her head in a scarf to protect her face from burning in the sun’s harsh rays.  It is winter and the top of Mount Illimani looms, covered in white glaciers in the distance (Fig. 4).

(Fig. 4) Raking the Coffee. (Photo: Stenn, 2012)

Union Pro Agro’s coffee undergoes a second drying on the cement patios of their processing plant in El Alto, La Paz, 10,000 feet above the jungles where this coffee was grown.  The sacks identify which farmer’s coffee is being dried.  Here coffee undergoes another quality check before being milled to remove the thin, dry, outer husk, packed in burlap export shipping sacks, and sold to global markets.  Twenty-one tons of Fair Trade and organic green coffee passed through here for export in 2011.  Mount Illimani’s 21,000 foot peaks loom in the background  Once home to the world’s highest ski slope, the slope closed in 2007 when climate change caused the glacier to melt.  Bare areas of rock are seen in the photo.  Illimani, meaning “golden eagle” in Aymara, used to be pure white.  The evening sun hits it, turning it gold and pink.

Susana, the head of the gender development program of FECAFEB, the export organization that Pro-Agro is a part of came to visit the EL Alto plant one day.  Esther watched her walking around and talking to the men, checking with the engineers and technicians like she was their boss.  She wanted to be like that.  To walk up to the men and talk to them like a boss.  Instead she found herself waiting to be told what to do by them, though with her girl friends she could be the boss easily. 

She asked Susan at lunch if it were true that they were going to have a leadership training program for women.  She said it was and that this would be their third program.  She invited Ester to sign up to be a director of Pro-Agro.  Each FECAFEB member needed to have a woman on their directorate.  She thought Ester would be a good director.  As a director, she would get leadership training which she would then be able to offer to the other women in her region.  That sounded perfect to Ester.  Her friends were always shy to speak up in meetings.  The men would laugh at them or make faces.  Then the woman would get shy and not say anything more.  Sometimes the women had really good ideas too.  But the men made it hard.  They said they liked the women to speak and they would listen to the women.  But they did not make it easy.  Ester felt shy and so did her friends.  Sometimes after a meeting, the boys would tease the girls about what she had said.  It is a form of terrible harassment.  She had to ask her father and he had to talk to the other people in Pro-Agro.  Ester was young, but many of the young people were taking on leadership roles in the coffee, or else they were leaving.  The young people had more education than their parents and understood how things worked with the foreigners better. 
Ester felt she would have a good chance to be offered the director position.  If not, Susan said here was also a gender officer position.  These new positions were being created to help their organizations have enough women in them like the other Fair Trade organizations did in other countries.  Ester was glad the Fair Trade was here.  She already had ideas that she thought would help Pro-Ago.  She wanted to roast the coffee and sell it at trade shows and have more tourism with foreigners visiting the families growing coffee, and even have a coffee shop in the town and the city where tourists could drink their coffee.  She though that just selling the green coffee beans for export was not enough. She saw the visitors come and knew that they sold her coffee for much more in their own countries after they roasted it.  She wanted to get a roaster and grinder for the cooperative so they can sell their coffee like this too.