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THE LUTHERAN WORLD RELIEF
FAIR TRADE COFFEE PROJECT
A Hill of Beans
by Nancy Goldberger
“I never thought we would have friends such as you, who would care enough to come and hear our story. Thank you for caring about us.” Julio Garcia, El Salvador coffee farmerIt’s hard to imagine living without hope. Yet for many around the world, hope is scarce. Imagine living in a place where you have little or no means to support yourself and your family. You want your children to go to school, to have a balanced diet, to play as children should, but those opportunities are few. Imagine living in a place where safe drinking water is a rare commodity, a place where 94 percent of the land has been deforested, a place that is overcrowded and cannot support the population, yet finding it nearly impossible to leave. Imagine almost a quarter of the population of your country living in conditions so terrible that researchers label the standard of living as “misery.” Imagine a place where six people die a violent death every day.Imagine waking up to this reality every day.This is life in El Salvador.
“I am telling you this because I want you to have an honest picture of El Salvador. I am from here--I am Salvadorian. But I am still here, because I want to make it better. What hope do I cling to? There is no hope in cotton. There is no hope in sugar cane....You are my hope....It would be hard to go on thinking no one was interested.” Juan Rojas, advocate and educator
I recently traveled to El Salvador for the Lutheran World Relief Coffee Project. As I prepared for the trip, I wondered what I would see and what I would learn. Would I be able to put any of my new knowledge into action, or would I just learn more facts that would make me feel helpless in a world so filled with need?
As the plane approached the airfield in San Salvador, I peered out the window into the darkness of the night. When my eyes adjusted, I noticed many small flickering lights on the ground. As we descended, I realized that these lights appeared in neat rows throughout the mountainous countryside. Puzzled at first, I soon saw that these were small fires, like campfires. Soon I would witness firsthand the lives of some of the people who built them.
After a full day of seminars about the history of El Salvador, its people, and the land, our delegation began learning about the coffee business. Coffee was first grown here as a cash crop in 1841, and quickly became a dominant export. As time passed, those who rule the land--members of seven families whose roots trace back to the Spanish conquistadors who conquered El Salvador and its indigenous peoples--began exercising greater control over the coffee farming business. In the following years, through bloody coups, oppressive wages, death squads, and war, the seven families slowly took control of almost everything else in the country, pushing the majority of the population out of the fertile valleys and up into the rocky land in the mountains.
Fair-Trade cooperatives: a positive alternative Next>
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