A Boy, a Mountain, a Sarape

Today was one of the coolest days of my life. We woke up and walked to Farmer Gabriel’s house to pick up baskets and hiked to the finca on the mountainside. There we received a brief history of his time in the coffee farming business and then spent about 2 hours picking coffee cherries. It was so simple but it brought me such joy to get the ripe ones from the top of the trees because the short native Guatemalans can’t reach. I did this, of course, while overlooking the town of San Miguel Escobar with the mountains and volcanoes in the distance while talking to my new friends about almost everything. All together, we picked 93 pounds of cherries, and Gabriel and our British translator, Joe, put the strap of the bag around their foreheads with the bag on their back and walked it down the mountain; very impressive. When we finally made it back to Gabriel’s house, we went through each of the steps in coffee preparation; from tree to cup. Finally, we were able to enjoy una taza de café. After this, we made our way out to Antigua on a chicken bus with plans to watch the parades for the Lint season, but it just happened to be raining for the first time since December, so we did a little shopping instead. I finally found a sarape and life can move on just a little easier. Once we got back to our quaint little town, we had dinner with a different farmer by the name of Freddy. Freddy and I got to talk about Guatemala’s climate and how this past January, they had a frost for the first time in 30 years. He says it just because of Guatemala’s unpredictable weather and climate and probably has nothing to do with climate change because his father had seen random periods of cold before this. He believes that the freeze is affecting some of their cherries because they are only staying yellow and not ripening any more past that.

I’m just glad I got my sarape.