magic beans and chloroquine dreams

"Standing over the small frames of the Indians
gathered to see the procession pass, the blonde head
of a North American can occasionally be glimpsed,
who, with his camera and sports shirt, seems to be
(and in fact, actually is) a correspondent from
another world..."

-Ernesto "Che" Guevara, _The Motorcycle Diaries_


" ...and now I am one more soul walking free in a
white skin, wearing some thread of stolen goods:
cotton or diamonds, freedom at the very least, prosperity.
Some of us know how we came by our fortune, and
some of us don't, but we wear it all the same. There's
only one question worth asking now: How do we aim
to live with it?"

-Barbara Kingsolver, _The Poisonwood Bible_


*

SO FROM SAN Jose, Costa Rica I caught a bus to the town of Turrialba, and from there to a tiny village called Jicotea (or Jicsville for short), to a small organic coffee farm in the mountains. I worked for a family from Ohio who had moved there eight years back, in part because of the mother's health problems - they couldn't afford US health insurance, and health insurance in Costa Rica is public, and affordable.

I worked till noon or 1 pm each day, wandering the rolling flower-strewn mountaintops picking magic red beans from little trees, or hacking away with a machete and a handsaw at the vines and grass that would swallow the coffee trees whole if not cut back, or climbing immense fruit trees to prune the highest branches, or breaking ground with a shovel and folding in compost for a new garden.

In the afternoons I followed mountain streams to their source, or sat in a rocking chair on the front porch reading or watching the world go by (at least the little of it that passed through Jicotea), or played soccer or swam in the river with the neighborhood muchachos. Each morning I was awoken early by the sound of fresh-roasted coffee being ground in the kitchen (someone should invent an alarm clock that makes that sound...) -- really, really good coffee, which I guzzled like a grad student.

Coffee production, I learned first-hand, is a bafflingly labour-intensive process, especially when you do everything by hand. Skipping the many steps that precede the actual picking, here's a brief run-down of the elbow grease that goes into a cup of joe:

1. picking the beans, which are often grown on far-from-even terrain
2. soaking the beans
3. putting the beans through a little hand-powered (blister-bestowing) grinder to pull off the red skin
4. sorting through the pulp to collect all the beans
5. drying the beans in the sun
6. running the dry beans through another hand grinder, this time to break away the thin chaff
7. sprinking the beans/chaff in front of a fan to blow away the chaff
8. hand-sorting the beans to pick out bad ones and remove any remaining chaff
9. roasting the beans in the oven, carefully stirring them every eight minutes to keep them from burning
10. grinding the beans

I'm sure there are far more efficient ways to do it, but that's how we did it, and that's probably why the coffee tasted so damn good.

Anyway, after 10 days or so I was ready to move on. I was hardly speaking any Spanish there, and assisting gringo settlers (even environmentally-conscious ones) really wasn't how I wanted to be spending my time. So after a couple of days camping in the mountains nearby, I headed north to Nicaragua, the largest and poorest country in Central America. [I can't hope to cover in a few sentences this wonderful country's history of brutal dictatorships, natural disasters, foreign domination, popular revolution, ten years of war with a US surrogate, nor the political corruption and "structural adjustment" that has followed the Sandinista's electoral defeat in 1990.] I had planned on only spending a week or so in the country, but, captivated by the place and the people, ended up spending three, and had a very hard time leaving at that.

I first spent two days in stuffy and conservative Granada, when I should have spent only one, one day in young and radical León, when I could easily have spent more, and in between, two days in chaotic and baffling Managua, where I never managed to find a downtown and nearly got jumped by toughs in broad daylight. (Somebody cover that last bit so my mum doesn't read it.) While I was there, though, I met a couple of sexagenarian Quakers who had just come from studying at a Spanish language school in Estelí in the north, which they enthusiastically recommended. I've never been one to refuse the advice of sexagenarian Quakers, so I decided I'd enroll, instead of studying in Guatemala like everybody else, as I'd planned.

The program consisted of 4 hours of one-on-one classes in the morning, tours of local projects and social justice or environmental groups in the afternoons, and homestay with a family near the school for the duration. Estelí has long been a Sandinista stronghold, and the language school maintains links with a number of progressive groups in the community. There is no government support for such groups (and less and less for schools, hospitals, and other basic services), so all funding -- what little there is -- comes from foreign governments or NGOs, or in cases where it is possible, from the project's own self-sufficiency. There were so many gifted and dedicated people struggling to keep their work afloat, crippled by a lack of funds but doing whatever they can anyway. Without the work of these people I can't imagine how much worse things would be.

Everyone, it seemed, had lost family members in the revolution or the Contra war. Rosibel, the central pillar of the family I stayed with, was always eager to talk about the revolution, the war, or the "barbarity" of the current situation -- the abject poverty and the farce of the current political scene, the recent selling-off of Nicaragua's water and electrical systems and huge price escalation currently underway, and the US-Central American Free Trade Agreement currently being finalized.

I also got to know some really wonderful fellow travellers from Canada and the US who were also studying at the school. Throughout our time there, conversations among us or with our host families would frequently turn to the tragedy of Nicaraguan (or global) politics, and would invariably end with us shaking our heads helplessly, saying, or thinking, "how horrible/sad/outrageous/infuriating/shocking/unfair that is," followed by long silences, for in the face of what we were learning, there was really nothing we could say. All we could do was try to face it unblinkingly, and try to understand. Simultaneously wondering what the hell we were doing there, and wanting to be nowhere else.

We were all, I think, grappling with our suddenly obscene-seeming privilege in a land of deep sorrow and grinding poverty; all of us curious and naive and searching with open hearts for something hopeful to hang on to, all of us grappling with that question Barbara Kingsolver levels in the second epigraph, above: How do you aim to live with what you've learned? In a place where tourism is at once so richly rewarding (people are so friendly here) and so offensive (given that all around you people are struggling just to put food on the table each day), I've been thinking a lot about that question.

At night my dreams are vivid, and far from subtle. Often they involve witnessing some great injustice or natural disaster occuring before my eyes, while all around me people go about their daily lives, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

The nighttime and early morning noises in Estelí took some getting used to, and probably didn't help to soothe my overactive, chloroquine-tainted subconscious. The town's dogs would hold conference calls at random hours of the night, and so would the roosters, though never both at the same time. We lived beside a butcher shop, where the pork and poultry were so fresh they were still walking around the back yard. From my bedroom, the animal noises next door sounded like they were coming from directly beside me. Between the roosters' hoarse, sustained squawks, the footsteps of amorous cats prowling the tin roof above, the conspiratory muttering (and occasional early-morning slaughter) of pigs, and the Sunday morning (or Thursday afternoon, or Friday evening...) graphic and sustained vomiting of the old man next door who, Nubia told us matter-of-factly, "drinks too much," I slept rather more lightly, and rose earlier, than I usually do.

After six days of Spanish classes I had "covered" 13 verb tenses in 3 moods, and could hold no more, so I decided to take a break somewhere remote, and digest what I'd learned. I went to the Miraflor Nature Reserve, a truly stunning and diverse community of small-scale coffee farmers organized into cooperatives, spread over a large area of lush cloud forest, high above Estelí, far beyond such luxuries as electricity and running water. The cooperative structure of the community had been established during the revolution, and had managed to survive all the Reagan-imposed horrors that followed. It currently sustains itself on coffee production and modest ecotourism, and is a place I definitely want to return to, cuz what with the lil' stomach bug I befriended, I didn't get to see nearly as much of it as I wanted to.

And from there I finally decided (still with some reluctance) to leave Nicaragua, and climbed aboard a souped-up school bus blasting "Eye of the Tiger" and "Funkytown", bound for the Honduran border. I spent a couple of days exploring Tegucigalpa, the capitol, and then headed into the western highlands, where three days ago I stepped off the bus into the dusty streets of a place called Hope (Esperanza), under threatening rainclouds that never delivered anything but shade.

I had never thought of hope as a place you pass through on your way somewhere else.


"Travel light, on strong legs and with a fakir's stomach."
-Ernesto Guevara