Christmas and Coffee

This is the last time I’ll get a chance to use the internet before Christmas, so MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE! To all my family and friends, know that I’m thinking of you and miss you all very much. A special thanks to all of you who have sent mail- much appreciated!

Here’s a picture of my Christmas tree, for those of you who asked! (Notice the bright wall hangings in the background? My host mom kindly decorated my room for me. The towel on the left has white tail deer on it, how did she know? Haha)

Let me see here, what’s new since last week…Thursday I went with a family in my community to pick coffee. They have land about an hour away, so we left about 5:30am. It was a freeeeeeeeeezing cold ride in the back of a pickup…but once we got down off the mountain things really warmed up, and I was sweating by midmorning. But before we got started picking coffee, they made a fire to make coffee and heat up beans and tortillas. As far as I can tell Guatemalans don’t believe in working on an empty stomach!

As far as picking coffee goes, to me it seems a lot like picking blueberries. For this first harvest, all the coffee isn’t ripe, so you go through and only pick the bright red ones, leaving all the green ones behind. The bushes (or are they trees?) are bigger than blueberry bushes though, and although the fruit looks delicious…it doesn’t have too much taste. We stopped at lunchtime to make another fire and cook ramen noodles (with tortillas of course), and then finished up by 3:30 or so. They kindly told me that “me abundó”, that I picked a lot, but I think I only picked about 40 pounds, max. If you’re good, you can pick 80 or 100 pounds, or more, in a day! Maybe I’ll do better next time…

Yesterday I went with my women’s group to a market in a nearby city to sell jam that they’ve made. They make pineapple, strawberry and apple jam, as well as spicy veggies (carrots, broccoli and cauliflower canned with jalapeno peppers). Pretty good stuff. While they were selling, I explored the market a bit, and did some shopping for my host mom. She asked me to pick up the ingredients for “ponche”, a fruit punch that seems to be THE drink for Christmas around here: a pineapple, a cantaloupe, a papaya, a coconut, grapes, raisins, prunes, and rosa de Jamaica (not exactly sure what this is, some kind of dried flower?). Sounds pretty good, huh? People here are pretty stymied when I tell them that we don’t make ponche for Christmas, nor tamales.

So I guess that’s it for now. Wishing everyone a safe and happy Christmas! I’ll be with you in spirit!