The Dominican Republic Faith and Justice Experience 2007: Day Six

While most of our days had begun by traveling into Santo Domingo and surrounding areas, today we started our morning by heading into the mountains to the North-West of San Cristobal, to the community of Los Cacaos. There we were to meet with people from La Esperanza, a coffee-growers' association, and be billeted with a local family for the night, before trekking up a mountain trail near the village. In two days we would be placed with families in different communities across the country for a week and a half, and this one-night billet would be a chance for all of us to get our feet wet in Dominican culture.
The journey up the mountain was a couple hours long, up a windy road around steep curves, often feet from the edge of plunging cliffs. As we moved further into the mountains, the vista over-looking the surrounding valleys became more and more magnificent, with greenery flowing out into the distance, back dropped by the staggered peaks of mountains on the horizon.
I was astounded by the infrastructure in this incredibly remote area of the country, the roads were well-maintained, and an intricate system of rock and mortar ditches winded along with the road, while stone retaining walls held back erosion. Periodically we would pass groups of men working on the ditches and walls, collecting stones, building new sections, and repairing damage. It was evident that this was an on-going project, and that there was a constant and concerted effort to maintain this path into the wilderness in the best possible condition. And for good reason too. In 1979, Hurricane David, a Category 5 hurricane, ripped through the Dominican Republic, wreaking havoc and killing close to 2000 people. In this region, where coffee is the main industry, communities were devastated. This road was rendered impassable by the torrential rains that accompanied the storm and by thousands of felled trees, cutting off Los Cacaos from the world. A group of citizens from the community were forced to make the same trek we were now, on foot, to reach civilization and to get aid air-lifted into the village. Re-building efforts took an understandably long time, but for the coffee industry, recovery would take years.
This is where La Esperenza comes in. A group of young people gathered together shortly after the disaster, trying to pool together the resources to develop a coffee collective in the Los Cacaos area. Through the years, while facing the challenges of building a sustainable business model and sporadic lulls in the coffee market, the association developed their product, accreditation, and processing facility to the point that today there are nearly 900 members of the collective.
Aside from fostering an evolving operation, the association has begun to put resources towards supporting the community. Scholarships established by the group allow for capable students to attain post-secondary education, whether in the Dominican Republic or abroad in Cuba or Costa Rica. The hope is that these students will someday return to carry on growth and help re-vitalize their small and remote community. As the collective recognizes how taxing the cultivation of coffee and other agricultural processes can have on the environment, they are working to diversify the industrial base of the economy, and putting research and resources towards ecological preservation and tourism. From a progressive business perspective, their goals are to promote the Fair Trade brand, and to begin exporting more of their product.
As we ended our meeting with the management group of La Esperanza, I was stunned. Coming from PEI, where we are constantly wringing our hands worrying about the sustainability of communities and watching youth fly off out West or to the States to find new jobs; it was incredible to see a small community in the middle of the mountains of a developing country creating solutions to their own problems. This wasn't a rich business venture propped up by government; it was a small community effort, for the people and by the people, quite literally built out of the ashes, from the ground up. I lauded the group who presented to us about their company, some of them who had been there from the beginning, telling them that their passion and awareness was encouraging, and that I wished the people back home were as proactive and passionate about their communities as the people of Los Cacaos obviously were. The La Esperenza experience in Los Cacaos is a prime example of a small community creating and filling a need. It was certainly light years away from Polar Foods anyway.
After some more rice and beans, we toured the coffee processing facility where the beans were dried, roasted, separated, and packaged. In a room just off the main road through the village, women were seated at tables sorting through the beans, separating the 'good', basically beans with no blemishes or discolouration, from the 'bad' beans (those possessing the aforementioned defects). Seemed simple enough: sit around and sort beans. Wicked. So we sat down to try it out, and other than turning to the woman next to me to confirm if a bean was good or bad every 26 seconds, it was about as exciting as my days packing diagnostic kits at Diagnostic Chemicals. We sat there for about half an hour, and between the 8 of us, logged about a quarter crate, thus about a quarter box for a collective 2 hours. The women, we were told, could fill a crate in about the same amount of time. Of course instead of wandering in and messing around with a pile of beans for half an hour, most of them work 8 or 9 hour days, some of them doing the same thing everyday for the better part of the past few decades.
Our trip into the mountains was cut short at that point. The son of one of the Administrators had been in a motorcycle accident early that afternoon, and as we were sorting beans, the news arrived that he had since died from his injuries. The townspeople were obviously upset as we thanked our hosts and offered our condolences and piled in the van for a long and silent trip back down to San Cristobal. It was an abrupt and disappointing end to our excursion into the mountains, but it was clear that this community, so accustomed to coming together to face adversity, would be totally focused on embracing the family and friends of the young man, and they sure as hell didn't need a bunch of Canadian on-lookers wandering and gawking around.
Instead, some cheer-up ice cream and a trip to the call centre to call home marked the end of our day.