School Trip Crashers!

My first Friday in site, my host mom asked me around 9pm if I wanted to go to a coffee finca (farm) the next day in Jinotega. Without hesitation, I said, “Sure! What time? Any time after 3:30am works for me.” She laughed and said, “We have to be ready at 5:30am.” It sound early, especially for all of you who know me in the states. I sometimes go to bed around that time. Here I wake up round 4:45am since we got to bed by 10pm each night. I could try to blame my early wake up time on the roosters that crow every day at 4:45am, but they make the noise day and night.

When my host mom’s brother showed up at 5:40, his son and daughter were in the car, which confused me. Especially since his daughter was pretty dressed up, but I should have been surprised my host mom was wearing high heeled suede booties to go to the coffee farm. We made several stops because her brother knows everyone and we were running some errands for his business. Then we went to the park in Ocotal and there were about 25 young adults standing around. That’s when I figured out that my host mom and I were crashing a school trip.

Some of the students are studying agribusiness specializing in coffee farms and some are studying to be coffee connoisseurs. The son is a student in the agribusiness program and his father was invited as a special guest because he own coffee farms.

On the way to the coffee farm, we went to have a typical Nica breakfast at a stop along the highway. They had one breakfast option. The only selection was you could choose to not include one of the components. The one option consisted of bean, eggs, cream, cuajada (a soft crumbly cheese), avocado, tortillas and coffee of course.  It was pretty good, nothing special since I eat all the components on a regular basis. Even avocado is something that I eat so frequently that I don’t really even think about it. I have tried the small avocados, which I didn’t really like. One day we had avocados that had yellow flesh and they were delicious!

The farm was quite far away and we were flying in an SUV. I can’t imagine how it would have been by bus. The drive was beautiful! According to Lonely Planet, “The back road from Estelí, has got to be one of the most beautiful drives in the country. It’s just high-altitude beauty, with one town, La Concordia, almost exactly 33km from Jinotega and 33km from Estelí.” Then we passed the Lago de Apenás-Asturias. “The third largest body of water in Nicaragua is artificial, formed in 1964… It is two lakes, much larger Lago de Apenás (54 sq km) and its smaller, northern brother, Lago de Asturias (3 sq km)… There is a hydroelectric dam, and PlantaCentroamérica produces about 50,000kw and usually holds about 324 million cubic meters of water; during Hurricane Mitch it held back 756 million cubic meters, just barely.”

We eventually turned off a main road and were on a road through a small town. We had to ask a few people for directions. Everyone of course knew the place and each person kept saying a little bit further up the road. Of course there’s not a sign to let you know you’re close or even when you finally arrive. We made a sharp right turn and followed a dirt path about 15 minutes all hoping we were on the right path and luckily we were. We finally reached the entrance of the place, Santa Maura, around 11:30am.

The coffee farm was incredible! It functions like a small town. They have a couple hundred permanent workers and their families. There is even a primary school for the children of the workers. We were given a special tour, which included an hour-long powerpoint presentation on the logistics of their farm and then we toured around the finca to see different coffee plants. It was my first time seeing coffee plants. I learned a ton about different coffee farming philosophies. We also got to go where their outdoor nursery where they have seedlings waiting to grow large enough to be transplanted.