If this international law thing doesn't work out, I can always pick coffee

Every day on the way to and from campus, our buses pass through acres and acres of coffee plantations. I always thought they were beautiful, and this past weekend I had the opportunity to actually step inside the leafy green fields to pick some of the coffee myself. Why, you may ask? The idea was to let students experience what it's like to do the work and to interact with the local coffee pickers. It was really an amazing experience.

We showed up at 8:00 a.m. on Saturday, and they loaded us into the back of a wagon that was pulled by a tractor. This is how the workers are transported to and from work every day. (Of course, the regular workers had already been working since 6:00 a.m.; we just got to sleep in a bit.)


Our coffee-picking destination was along the same road we take to school every day. Below is a picture of the portion of the road that "broke" and caused us to be displaced for the first three weeks of class. The original road was actually off to the right of the photo, but there was a bit of a landslide (note all the fresh dirt), so they just created this new road here with gravel and dirt. There's a really steep drop into a canyon off to the right of the photo.


So, I never really thought about how coffee beans grow exactly, but I never would have guessed they look like berries. But guess what? They do. (See below.) We were given instructions to only pick the red berries and to leave the green ones on the plant (I presume they wait for the green ones to ripen, then pick those). Picking them is a very tedious process, since you are supposed to avoid collecting leaves or green berries. No one wears gloves because they make it too clumsy to work with. If you smoosh the berry, you find two white seed/bean things inside that look exactly like peanut halves. Apparently these are then rinsed off, dried, and then I think they actually crack open and the coffee bean is inside them. Then you roast the beans.


Here are my spoils! I only picked for about an hour or two, and I didn't get very far. We pooled all of our collections together, and we were told that we would have earned a TOTAL of about $5. Split between 18 people, that means we each earned about 30 cents for our hour or two of work (but we were a lot slower than the normal workers).


This guy picked a lot more than me...


This guy below is only 16, and he's been coffee-picking since he was 8. Apparently the average worker picks about 6 to 10 of these baskets of coffee every day, which is the equivalent of about $8 to $14. But the faster guys can pick up a few more baskets a day, bringing the earnings, at most, to about $17 a day.


Here are some more workers. Most of them are from Nicaragua and come for seasonal work. The company apparently gives them free housing while they work, and they work 8 hours a day. Around February, when coffee-picking season slows down, they go work in the sugar cane fields.


Both men and women work in the fields, and they often bring their kids with them, either to work or just to hang out with them. There was one 16-year-old girl there working, and this baby below is hers. (I'm not exactly sure who the girl holding the baby is -- I think the 16-year-old's sister or maybe one of the worker's kids.)


And here's just a random shot of the coffee plantation.

So here's my favorite part: Apparently the coffee beans we picked are separated into different grades, and the high-grade beans are exported while the lower-grade beans stay in the country. Guess who this coffee plantation sells its high-grade beans to? Starbucks. Seriously. So the next time you're drinking Starbucks coffee, you may be drinking beans I picked with my own hands!