You Might be Drinking Coffee I Picked

If, for some reason, you are ever forced to choose to do some sort of manual farm labor, I highly recommend coffee-picking. The fact that coffee farms (well, the good ones) are tucked under a mix of timber and fruit trees makes them pleasant to work on, especially for the wildlife that you won’t find in the typical farm field. Iridescent blue, orange, lime-green and yellow birds, whose names I only know in colloquial Spanish, flit overhead. The coffee itself is beautiful: bright yellow or crimson with dark green leaves. Typically in this season families go out to the farm together and pick the day away, building a fire at midday to heat their tortillas.

I was lucky enough to engage in very fulfilling intellectual conversations with my good 8 and 10-year-old-friends… “I say Gail in jail!”, “I say Nicolle in jail!”, “I say Veronica in jail, singing and dancing!” “I say Nicolle in jail, telling a joke!” and so on.

Most adults picked 3 or 3.5 buckets full of coffee. The kids picked a half or one bucket-full. I was a happy medium with 2 buckets-full. Each bucket picked will earn you $1. It’s not a great way to make a living (although I’ve heard of people who have been able to pick 20 buckets worth in a day), but it’s a nice way to pass the day if you have good company.

For me, it’s interesting to wonder who’ll end up drinking this coffee that I picked. Could he identify a coffee shrub in a line-up? Does he know where Honduras is?

The dreaded grocery-store synopsis
I’m finally going home for a visit, after 2 ½ years of Peace Corpsing. I am so excited I can’t sleep through the night. I think of all the friends and family I haven’t seen, and how incredible it will be to reconnect with them. Of course thoughts of eating bagels with salmon and going skiing bring a smile to my face as well. But I’m also filled with a dull sense of dread.

What I’m scared of isn’t the commercialism or the advances in technology or the development in my home town or my long-time friends who have joined cults or dinner clubs or become nudists or Republicans, although these things make me uneasy. I’m scared of the grocery-store.

I’m worried about all those people I’m going to run into in Fred Meyer who will ask me how “Africa” or “Tanzania” or “the Peace Corps” was. These people are asking the only appropriate thing there is to ask, fulfilling their curiosity and their duty to ask. But I’m sure they won’t realize that it would be easier for me to give a synopsis of War and Peace in 2 minutes (although I haven’t read it) than try to give a meaningful statement about my Peace Corps experience in the unspoken time limit. I’m scared of leaving these people with a generic or inarticulate or gushingly-positive or unnecessarily negative report. I think the only true thing I can say about it so far is that it has been incredibly . . . . . I’m sorry, just one sec, I should really get this. Hello? Right, just a minute. . . . I’m really sorry, that was my Mom, and she really needs me to go, we’ll catch up some other time, ok?

Party in the Dark

When you feel like the world is plagued with hypocrisy, greed, and evil, sometimes the only medicine is a little girl bringing you flowers. The community I live in boasts a high proportion of kids who are sweet to the bone.

The other night I was about to head off to teach English when the power flickered off. Thinking of how hard it would be to teach by candle-light (and admittedly how delicious it would be to stay in and read by candle-light), I headed to the school to cancel the class. I thought I was going insane when I heard voices coming from inside the classroom, which was locked from the outside.

The kids had spent all afternoon decorating the classroom, arranging refreshments, and locking themselves inside in order to orchestrate a surprise birthday party for me. The lights went out just after they were locked in. The little ones cried, but soon were mollified. I was rushed in to have a confetti-filled balloon popped over my head while they sang (in perfect English, yay!) Happy Birthday. We ate chips, drank Pepsi and played musical chairs, telephone and tug-of-war by candle-light. There hasn´t been that much shouting, laughing, screaming and even crying (inevitable when little kids play games) at my birthday party for at least a year... maybe 15.

These kids know just the remedy for feeling like you’re getting old.