Coffee Harvest

I have now been back in the country for a little over two weeks. What has been accomplished in those two weeks? Not a whole lot.
There are a couple reasons. First, since the due dates for the grants I was working on passed while I was in the US, I now have to wait 4 months to send in for the scholarship grants and the library grant (the library grant is “replacing” the stove grant). Both of these grants need a bit of work (a lot in the case of the library grant), but we have 4 months to do it, so people aren’t feeling too rushed yet. The medical mission in scheduled for February, and while there is a ton of work to do for that, the second, and more prominent reason that nothing has been accomplished keeps getting in the way of my progress. That reason is that right now it’s the coffee harvest. Any of you who are farmers out there can relate a little to this phenomenon of everything coming to a halt except the harvest. Take what you feel as a halt and multiply it by 1000.
Here’s why: coffee is a VERY labor intensive crop. There are no machines to harvest it; it has to be picked by hand. It’s not that these people are just too poor for machines; it’s that coffee is grown under and among other plants on the side of steep mountains, machines just aren’t feasible. EVERYONE picks coffee right now, kids, men, women, and about 7,000 Haitian migrant workers. After it’s picked and de-pulped it’s brought to the warehouse (this is where my association comes in) to be processed. Here is it processed the rest of the way (which includes drying, de-husking, classifying, sorting, bagging and perhaps toasting and grinding.) This process can take anywhere from 1-5 days depending on a variety of factors. Since 80% of the 10,000 residents’ primary income source is coffee and 50% of those utilize my association to process their coffee, the tiny staff has a lot to do during this time, and not a whole lot of time to help me out. Not only that, the people I work with who don’t work in coffee are still working overtime on whatever it is that they sell because now all the coffee farmers have money again.
I know it may seem like that now, after a year, I should be able to do everything on my own. In reality, I can, but there are two factors that stop me from doing that. First, while I know what we’re doing, can speak Spanish, and am actually the one organizing and planning everything, if I execute it by myself without a Dominican with me, people have less trust in the project. Not that they think I don’t know what I’m doing or that they distrust Americans, it’s that they’ve only known me for a year, and in a culture where relationships are the biggest part of your life, a year is nothing. Secondly, I will be gone in a year. The point of my service is sustainability. Clearly these people don’t need to build the library after I’m gone, but they need to know how we organized things and what the goal of the library was, why we did things the way we did.
Since there aren’t a whole lot of people free to do with projects, Claire (the other Peace Corps Volunteer), Theresa (a new volunteer from a German organization) and I have been hanging out a lot. In fact, I think tomorrow I will be going with them (and a Dominican or course) to see the opening cock fight of the season. It will be the first I’ve gone to. I’ll let you know how it went if I go.

Back to the DR!

So, after a frustrating morning running around to get authorization for my CT scan because things got all screwed up, I am officially cleared to return to the DR and will leave tomorrow morning at 8am! I'll be in the office in the capital tomorrow night and all day on Thursday, so if you have any last minute messages, send them quick, because I will probably retreat to my community (ie, no internet) for a good while since I've been gone so long. Thanks to EVERYONE for your messages and support, I appreciate it all. I am so lucky to have everyone supporting me! Thanks!