Cecilia and Idalia cleaning off the truck from the day before
Trying to get all the mud out of the garage
Weee!!!
Yipee!!!
Clouds approaching Berlin
The nearby town of Santiago of Maria
Of course, Lynn managed to find Nebraska gear in El Salvador
Toilet at the "mall" area. No seat and it smelled strongly of bleach.
The clouds are rolling in
Taking a load off
Guarding the truck with my new cuma (curved machete)
The finca where Don Justo Coffee is grown
Arquimides explains the process of creating coffee from tree to cup
This is where the coffee is laid out to dry after it is picked, de-shelled, and washed. The drying process takes 7 to 15 days. Groupings of coffee beans are set out at different times so they are able to continually dry coffee. There are machines that are used to dry coffee but this finca doesn’t have one. When the beans are dried they are a grayish brown color.
Coffee cherries - not ripe yet.
Coffee beans are three different colors: green, yellow, and reddish. You don’t pick the green or yellow ones, only the red ones, which are called cherries in English and uvas (grapes) in Spanish.
Learning how coffee is picked
You basically start and one end of the finca and pick off all the reds one in a row and them continue to move forward. You do sweeps of the finca to get the cherries. To do this you have a basket (canasta) in front of you that’s tied to your waist very tight. You pick the cherries and put them in the basket.
Arquimides telling us how heavy the basket gets.
Once you get about 20 to 25 pounds in the basket you put them in a sack you carry with you. Then you drag the sack with you as you collect more cherries. Most people collect 150 to 200 pounds per day.
Papayas at the finca. Not quite ripe yet.
Arquimides and I climbed the tree to pick jocotes (a kind of fruit)
Kathy asked me not to fall
I munched on a few jocotes
Blanca was checking out the corn field
I'm not sure what Idalia was doing (I was still in the tree)
A look back toward the building
Walking around the finca
Blanca and Idalia picked some jocotes from the ground
A beautiful area
Saltamontes!! Grasshopper!!
Sleeping like a leopard in the tree
I took this picture of Arquimides while we were up in the tree
Looking up
A closeup of jocotes
A proud warrior of jocotes with her bamboo picking tool
**We left the finca and headed back toward Berlin. Later that day we visited the toastery in Berlin to see where Don Justo Coffee is toasted.
Inside the toastery
The machine that removes the final layer of pulp around the coffee bean
Toilet inside the toastery
Mauricio, the man who lives and works at the toastery
Mauricio showing us the machine that toasts the coffee
Looking up over the walls into the park in the middle of Berlin. It's not finished yet.
We peeked inside and saw swingset equipment
The Pastoral House - Home sweet home
Lynn and I were buying purses at the Pastoral House later that night. They are stored in these giant tubs. So I crawled in one to see if I'd fit inside.
Then Lynn tried to lock me in but I managed to get free.
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