Coffee is picked by Nicaraguan families-men women AND children who, along with a pack of dogs flood the fields down the road every morning at dawn. Which is about 5 AM. I have no idea where they sleep, but I think it's in the fields someplace. They all haul plastic bottles for water to drink as, although the mornings usually start out foggy, by 10 AM the sun is up and quite hot.
My hostess, Bev, was quite concerned about the 'Nicco' pickers. She cautioned me to make sure the doors were locked and to not talk to them-as though I could. She also said to bring the hose into the garage so they wouldn't use it to fill their bottles with her water. She did not want them on her property and was quite upset that they had a right-of-way down her driveway and along the front of her yard..but she chose to build in the middle of a coffee field, so I figured she sort of needed to accept that the laborers would be coming every year at picking season. One of the reasons she chose to go back to the states this time of year was to be away during picking season...she has a very real fear of the pickers.
I, OTOH, don't. As far as I'm concerned, allowing them to take the water from the hose is simply a polite way of behaving. As I am up feeding the dog every morning as they come thru, I greet them with a 'Buenos dias" and gesture towards the hose saying "?Agua?" Some of them use the hose and some don't. The dogs greet Dobbie and sometimes he gos with them to the field, if I don't chain him up first that is.
This sort of casual waves, good mornings and so on continue as I walk the mile thru the field towards the road to the bus stop. All of the workers look gaunt and work their tails off, filling big bags full of the red beans, then hauling them to the driveway for a tractor to pick up. The kids have just as large of picking sacks as the adults do..sort of slings that go over one shoulder and form a large pouch at their waist or knees, depending on the size of the picker. Their hands move so fast-there is a limit to the number of green beans that they can pick..every green bean is a coffee bean that won't ripen and they are penalized for it.
After the upper couple of feet of plant have been picked several times over a couple of weeks, another worker comes along and lops off the top couple of feet from the coffee plant to allow sun to reach the lower beans. The trimmings are gathered up and used for campfires in the field and they always smell like roasting coffee in the nights when they are burning.
Watching the process has given me an appreciation for the cost of coffee-especially since I know that the average worker here makes $2.00 US a day as a picker and the kids are not allowed to go to school as they aren't citizens. There are no houses for the workers, nor medical either. Most of these families have come from villages where their houses have been torn down or burned out by drug lords. They cross the border by night and work on the sly in Costa Rica. It seems that we aren't the only country with illegal migrant workers. Most Costa Ricans would not do the stoop labor these families are willing to do either.
I believe from now on I'm going to buy Free Trade coffee only-where I know the laborer has been paid a living wage.
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