Christmas and Coffee Processing

I am going to talk about Christmas first, since there was yummy food involved. We spent Christmas with a couple that were hosting an amazing Christmas dinner. There were over 40 people from all over the globe. Each person we met was more entertaining than the last. I heard stories about how chili peppers are shipped to Tobasco, how one young guy is working on the construction for a nuclear waste plant, something about men using wax to remove body hair and in what countries/climate you should do that....trust me, it was very entertaining.

The food!!! I learned what paella is and by the way, it might be one of my new favorite dishes. I even took a picture. :) It has seafood, rice and all of the good stuff. I know that everyone probably thought I was weird taking pictures of the food at the party, but YUM!

Everyone brought something to the party, so there were many items for me to try!

The house and grounds were gorgeous and I took a few pictures of the flower decorations. I was amazed to find out that even though they look like plastic flowers, they were actually real.

Coffee Processing
​1. We measure how many coffee cherries were picked by each person. Below the mothers are watching the kids do the lifing of the bags and measuring how many latas (buckets) were in each bag. The boys were eager to see how much money their mother's had made, and wow...Those boys are stronger than they look!
​2. We pay the workers and then haul the coffee cherries off to have them processed.

After we get to the processing plant, we have to measure the beans again. We fill up the green box below (which is 10 latas) and then the guy flips the switch and the beans go down the chute. Our coffee is processed seperately, so we do not get to just dump it off like those other bags that you see in the pictures.

The man took a board to level off the green box to get an accurate count. When it was to the top, he pulled the lever and off the beans went! He used a smaller box to count the cherries that were less than 10 latas. We had 6 of these latas (buckets) this time.

In the pictures you can see that some of the cherries are not red. We have a couple of trees that have that make yellow cherries. They stand out in the field next to all of the red cherries!

After everything is counted and the cherries are all down the chute, we go to the office and get our receipt. It will take the cherries over a month to be processed, so we won't see this batch until February.

One last item! Sweet corn does not grow here. I am not sure why it does not, but it doesn't. However, there are a few people with large green houses that are attempting to grow it. They have to hand pollinate each plant and it turns out that it is hard to do. However, this year's crop with the bad weather had produced very small ears of corn. But, I bought some anyways! It was pretty good, just super small. Smaller than a beer bottle and skinnier too!