We take coffee for granted. Coffee, the first thing I think about every morning when I wake up, involves a long, intensive crop harvest, picking, drying and roasting of the beans, in order for the foriegn plant to be bagged, shiped, and soled in US stores. The hands involved in this process are numerous and most often, hands of color. A rare white hand has ever picked in coffee fields. But today, my white hands tried the (much easier) task of roasting Cafe Juana... My neighbor and I ventured to the market in search of the green beans. We found a local women named Juana, who sold us a bag of green pods - quite possibly picked from her back yard. We took the beans home and spent the afternoon roasting and toasting over a gas flame. Then, we crushed the beans with two blocks of wood until fine-ground, and finally ... into the pot it went to be boiled in water until we had what looked like... coffee.
The finished product made me a bit proud and reminded of the history of coffee in the Americas. Guatemala as well as other Central American countries have been the heart of coffee production. This in turn has attracted foriegn investment and economic control, and finally structured the labor market with manual labor as the foundation. My manual labor today was nothing in the face of people whose lives have depended on this crop for centuries and whose hands have never received fair compensation for harvesting this black gold.
