Johan DeSchiffart admits Nicaragua is “not a place I’d want to go for a tourist trip.”
As he and nine delegates journeyed through the mountains of the Central American country from January 3 to 12, they passed the remnants of war: the rusting husks of tanks lined the roads and gun turrets peppered the coastal heights.
The impoverished nation has been wounded repeatedly in recent decades, from the civil war in the late 1970s that brought the Sandinistas faction to power, through almost a decade of fighting with U.S.-backed Contras, to the devastation of Hurricane Mitch in 1998. Today, it remains the poorest country in Central America.
DeSchiffart, an elder at St. Andrew’s, Kitchener, Ont., and Cathy Finlay of Leaside, Toronto, are both retired teachers who embarked on a fair trade study tour through the church’s Education for Mission department.
Bouncing on the back of an open pickup truck, they ascended lush mountains shaded by trees full of chattering monkeys. The country’s highlands have a cooler climate and plenty of shade; both necessary things for growing coffee, a cash crop popular among Nicaraguan farmers.
At Cosatin, a coffee growing cooperative near Boaco, about two hours northeast of Managua, the group gleaned the last of the season’s red coffee fruit and helped to pulp it. The pulp would be used to make fertilizer, and the pits or coffee beans were sent to a processing cooperative where they were dried and evaluated for quality.
“There were nine of us picking coffee for one hour,” DeSchiffart jokingly told national office staff during a March presentation. “We picked only $3 worth of coffee. Six of us were ‘fired.'”
Under a fair trade model, producers receive a higher return on the sale of their goods, and in order for products to be fair trade certified, they must be produced according to higher social and environmental standards.
In Ocotal, a small northern city near the Honduras border, delegates met with representatives from Presbyterian-supported Soynica, a non-profit organization that works with just over 900 farming families in some of the country’s poorest regions.
“Rio Abajo, a small community of 88 families, was one of the areas of Nicaragua devastated by Hurricane Mitch,” Cathy Finlay said. “As our bus turned off the paved highway onto the dirt road leading into the community, the red of the bricks reminded us of P.E.I. Further into the valley, lush fields of red beans appeared, vibrant green against the browns of the ascending mountains.”
Rio Abajo has no electricity; the only running water is used for irrigation, so household water is carried from the fields in pails. Local farmers grow diverse crops including carrots, avocados, papayas, mandarins, lemons and bananas. Fields are ploughed with the aid of oxen, meaning each takes days of work.
But when the villagers threw a party for their guests, “the gap between cultures seemed to disappear,” said DeSchiffart. “The smiling and laughing faces gave each of us a feeling that as human beings, we are all connected.”
Fair trade products, including coffees, teas, flowers, cotton, and chocolate can be purchased from specialized shops or found in many supermarkets.For more information on fair trade products in Canada, see transfair.ca.
