A day of firsts

Looking back I distinctly remember being in Starbucks one day long before my Peace Corps service, and seeing an advertisement for a chance to win a week at one of Starbuck´s local coffee farms in Costa Rica. I definitely went on to Starbuck´s homepage and signed up for the one in a million probability of winning such a rare experience. Back then the idea of helping out on a coffee farm seemed exotic and far stretch, something that screamed the attention of my adventure seeking self.
Now, I find myself living in a small town in the middle of banana fields (we are proudly the banana capital of the world, if you ever wondered where bonanza bananas or even ocean product shrimp comes from, it comes from about three blocks from my apartment). About an hour from my site there is another site that produces coffee, cacao (what you make chocolate out of), and other more tropical climate products. For the last two years, I´ve been saying I was going to go out to the farm for a day and test my coffee harvesting skills, but with other projects in the way I never made it out during harvest time. This past weekend, I finally made it to the farm and had a great day of firsts… things I know my parents would not believe I had done if it were not for photo evidence!
First, we went to milk the cows. Back when I was in training in Cayambe I always wanted to try milking the cows but my host family used a machine since they had a large scale cow farm, so I never had the chance. Now I know why they had a machine, it is much harder than it looks! First, you have to round up the cows and tie their legs so you don’t get kicked. Then you bring in the baby cow who helps start the process making it a little easier for the person milking the cow. Then you try to fill up those buckets, and after about a minute of trying I was already tired. I would work so hard to get a drop of milk out of the cow, then the owners would step in and they were milking the cows with two hands at once and had the bucket filled in the time it took me to get a drop of milk out. So needless to say, I may need a lot more practice until I can be an expert in that area.

We later headed up the road to the coffee farm. Even though they are one of the smaller coffee farms in the area, they have a pretty extensive process and successful business. I´m not sure I´ve got the process a 100% memorized but it goes something like this:
1. Pick the yellow and red coffee beans.
2. Then you put all the beans in a bucket of water and the ones that are not as good to harvest (either it´s too premature or too old) rise to the top of the bucket, you separate these from the rest of the beans. These beans can be placed in the sun to dry, and sold in local markets to make instant coffee (like Nescafe instant coffee).
3. Then you use a grinder machine (obviously not the official name) which takes the shell off the bean. The coffee beans at this point are in a giant bin, and can be processed a couple of different ways depending on the type of coffee you want to make. If you don’t wash the beans (they naturally have this slipper honey coat on the) and take them directly out of the bin to dry, then you will have caramelized flavored coffee. Otherwise, you would let the beans stay in the bin for anywhere from 8 to 24 hours (the more time you let them stay in the bin the more they ferment and the stronger coffee you will produce). Later, you fill the bin with water and the beans soak for another day, then the water is drained, and the beans are placed in a type of greenhouse where they dry for three days (or more depending on the weather). Once the beans are ready, they are later toasted and grinded (that part I haven’t seen yet, but I´m hoping to make it back out to the farm for another day).
After harvesting coffee we headed to another part of the farm where they have tilapia pools. Goal for the afternoon: catch our lunch. Being the Floridian in the group and the fact that there were 3,000 tilapias in that pool, I should have done much better than I did at fishing! Although, I will say fishing with a homemade fishing pole (piece of wood, tied to a string with a worm at the end) is much harder than fishing with regular poles and there was a net over the pool making it a little more difficult to cast the pole. After about an hour, I finally had something, excited I yanked my strings up as fast as I could… only to find a tiny itsy bitsy baby tilapia stuck to the hook. When everyone laughed at the size of my fish, I just explained I was trying to catch one for the family’s cat to eat for lunch, now that I had one for the cat I was going to try to get a bigger one for us. In the end, we did catch 6 tilapias, and that Albert (the owner of the farms and counterpart to another volunteer), went shoulder deep into the pool with his net and caught 5 more. Back at the house, we killed, gutted, and cleaned the fish. They tried to teach me, but I apparently must not be very good at it cause my fish went flying off the table twice as I tried to kill it, and then the señora told me she´d step in, basically a polite way of saying ¨wow, you are awful at this and if we want to eat today, step aside!¨ After a great day of firsts (first time milking a cow, harvesting coffee, killing and cleaning fishes) and a delicious lunch of fried tilapia it was time to head back to my site. I can honestly say a few years ago when I signed up for the Startbuck´s competition, I never would have imagined I´d actually know the owner of a coffee farm and have the opportunity to go out to the farm whenever I want to adventurously try out all types of farming only an hour from where I live!