The Finca

The past cold rainy week has faded away as i have fed my body and spirit here at this amazing little beach town of Mixunte.

Everyone in the household made the treck up to the Finca. It took in total 3 hours of up hill terrain, half of which was walking through the once was jungle. It is now all second growth, coffee farm or pasture. The coffee farm is not what I excpected it, and most, are coffee trees under a canopy of larger trees, it is essentially a forest.

The Finca itself is a tiny old cement building with a leaky rook and an out door cooking eating area. I was grateful we brought a tent! If we had not it would have been 10 of us sleeping on the dirt floor in the tiny house!

We got one productive day we cleared an area for the nursery and started a little kitchen garden. We picked coffee seed and hand husked them all preparing them for planting. It had been wet for days but the rain came in quick and heavy and stayed with us for over two days. We were stuck up on the mountain with nothing to do and nowhere to go.

Food was running scarce, beans, tortillas and coffee. Yes one can live off of these three things only and do physical work as well.

A couple of guys went out hunting and came back with an endangered animal, the ant eater. It was beautiful and lying dead before me. I was disgusted and intrigued at the same time. I watched as the kids play with the body and the dogs fight over it. I could not eat it, though everyone else said the meat was great... of course it was they had not eaten anything substantial for days.



It is important in this kind of work to stick out the hard times with the people who live there and have no choice. My instinct that first rainy day was to flee and fast. But i could not and many great experiences came out of our time together in such lousy conditions. It demonstrates conradmanship, dedication and fosters a deeper understanding for the hardships that they endure. It builds trust which is a key componant of organizing a group of people and advancing as a community.

The treck off of the mountain was to say the least insane, The mud was overwhelming, the trail we came in on was now a stream. We were a sight as we climbed up and onto the street, head to toe mud and wet.



Needless to say the next day i was out of there, I had to take a break from the constant struggle, i had to eat and revamp before we start the next phase of the project.