Niki Andresen: The Dawning of the Moose in Guatemala

Waking up in Guatemala city was really opening my eyes to the city for the first time, since we arrived in the dark we only had the scope to marvel at the illuminated signs of familiar chain restaurants. Today we transcended the excitement of KFC.

We travelled along in our Nanajuana Bus in the careful hands of our beloved driver Marcos leaving the Best Western behind. Our first stop was actually a mall, a mall that hadn’t quite opened. We had a few minutes to explore and lost our way to the top floor near a parking lot where we gawked at the view. A parking attendant saw our excitement and foreshadowed the next leg of our journey gesturing off to the horizon full of mountains , forests and tucked away agriculture.

The ride to Antigua followed a gradient of culture; moving from globalized bustle to rural habitation, and as a surprise at the end we rolled in on cobble roads. Antigua has a distinct feel to it, –although we hardly experts on Guatemala- we instantly whipped out our cameras as if it was about to disappear altogether.

Our first stop was an informational lunch where we met with Tino, who specializes in maternal health in the Solola region of Guatemala, and his wife, one of thirty public psychiatrists working in Guatemala. Tino’s enlightened us to the use of Maternal Health as an indicator of development, and its quantitative results in Guatemala.

Since the peace accords were signed in 1996, maternal health has become a priority. To begin they needed to collect data on the intensity of problems in each region, these efforts began in 1998. At the start of Tino’s 16 years of experience, only 3% of women accessed maternal health care, and now it’s at a whopping 60%. He spoke on the unique regional differences that make a national health plan inefficient. The ethnic make-up and cultural differences play a key role in how health care is viewed and used in the community.

His wife also spoke of her work as a psychiatrist where stigma often leads to problems. This was more so in the middle class, where as those in poverty –unfamiliar with the practice-felt she was more “a doctor of the brain”.

Our next stop should’ve been the hotel, but since we were all pretty anxious to get started on our tour of the coffee plantation. This is where we met Eddie our wonderful tri-lingual tour guide. He guided us through the fascinating process of coffee production. Coffee is red, green, grey, yellow, brown, and black and you’d never know because we’re only exposed to the end of this process.

 

Coffee starts as sort of a cherry that gradually turns red to signal that it’s ripe. These cherries are picked by workers who are paid in accordance with the weight they bring in, 100 pounds gives about 70 Quetzales –which is about 10$. The average worker pulls in about 50-60 Quetzales worth of cherries a day. Paying by weight is how coffee plantations manage to avoid the 75 Quetzales a day minimum wage.

The cherries are dumped into a large tub of water, like sorting cranberries they are separated by density. The cherries that have fallen victim to the driller fly have holes, and will float. Meanwhile the quality cherries sink to the bottom to continue the process.

 

Those inferior cherries will be roasted and turned into instant coffee where they will most likely be served back to Guatemalans. The quality ones enter the fermentation process. Where the slimy layer coating the bean turns into a parchment called pergeminos –a word I’d earlier mistakenly believe to be perogies- that flakes off to be reused as flooring in the horse stables.

The beans now go through a massive sorting process for size, qualities, and being picked through several times to assure quality.

 

Finally, the tour ends where we all hoped it would, with some delicious coffee tasting. That perk was the energy that took us long into a night of fascinating adventure.

 

Niki is a second year Global Stewardship student who is participating in the Capilano University Guatemala Field School.  The group will be travelling to Antigua, Tikal, Livingston, the Del Monte Bananera and Guatemala City over the next 10 days.