I love coffee, I love tea / I love the java jive and it loves me! –The Ink Spots
Charlie writes: Saturday I got Dianne a job picking coffee to help pay for the trip. If she works really hard, she might make $5 a day! At that rate, we can get a plane ticket home… well… never, I guess. But that is the going rate of pay around here. So I guess she might as well quit the job and continue her life of leisure. :)
We actually visited a small family run coffee plantation. Most of the process is mechanized, but the picking needs to be done by hand, because each coffee fruit ripens at a different time, so a plant will have green ones, red ones, and a variety of colours in between. Picking requires distinguishing the subtleties, and no machine can do that yet.
They also grow sugar cane, so we learned that process too. It’s a lot like making maple syrup, except the cane is pressed to squeeze out the sap, which is then boiled. We made a little candy to take home. We also had an excellent snack made completely from things grown on their farm, washed down with really fresh coffee, sweetened with their sugar.
Life is good, especially since we did not have to pick the coffee. It’s perhaps a little less good for those who have to pick coffee to earn a living, although any job is better than none.
We had a ride back in a traditional ox cart – possibly a bigger load than the oxen were used to.
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