Guatemalan Farm Life

It was starting feel like a bit of a holiday and, with Mexican beaches on the horizon, I thought it would do me good to volunteer for a week on a farm where I could do some honest work and contribute to society.

Comunidad Nueva Alianza is a community project that started out as a group of bereaved farm workers. What happened is that when the coffee prices crashed in the 1990s the workers were not paid for 18 months and ultimately the owner went broke. Obviously this couldn’t go on so the workers got together and started a lengthy legal action that resulted in the purchase of the property in 2004. There are around 300 people living here in the community and the land is divided up amongst the families – they each work their own plots. The main industry here is the production of coffee, macadamias and purified water. The community is really like a little village with a school, church, football field and shop.

I was expecting this to be a culturally enriching experience, but if I’m honest, it wasn’t really. The work I did was generally factory type labour and in that environment, you need to be on your game and you can’t stop and chat. After work was done, I came back to the hotel for lunch and then it rained for the rest of the day so everyone was holed up in their respective digs. I did however thoroughly enjoy some quiet time to read lots of books.

The first day’s work was collecting macadamias with Gladys and Arturo. After walking for about 40 minutes, we got to their plot. The job then was to collect all the macadamias that had fallen from the trees. So there we were, scurrying around the side of the soggy and slippery mountain, picking up the little green nuts off the ground. Between the three of us, we collected over 100kg in a few hours. Arturo carried about 70kg on his back, Glady’s about 35kg on hers, and me, I had about 15kg in a rice sack, slung over my shoulder like Santa Claus. I kept slipping over in all the muddy bits too, Gladys was generously blaming my shoes (my $200 trainers), while they shuffled away efficiently in their (probably) $1 thongs.

Next day I was on macadamia sorting. The days here start and finish early, in order to get everything done before the rain comes. I was on duty just after 6.30am, first at the machine that cracks open the outer husks. Not all the nuts get cracked properly so we had to pull out all the ones that had to go through again. I have never done this sort of work before and it is quite intimidating. This big machine keeps spitting these things out and you just have to keep going, don’t stop. The equipment is all very low here too and I am the tallest person by far and bending over is quite painful after a while. After breakfast, we shoveled all the finely chopped husks into bags for composting then got on to the job of sorting the good nuts from the bad. All by hand. It took a good few hours.

Day three, and Tara the Peace Corps worker thought I might want a day off but really, every other day is a day off for me at the moment so I said load me up. Luckily it was a relatively easy task of painting the toilet doors in the new part of the hotel. A nice shade of headache green. The job was made a little more tricky with unprepared surfaces, no primer and paint with a consistency of treacle. To be fair, they look awful but I’m sure another volunteer can have a go at making them look better once they dry properly.

On days four and five I helped out the girls at Agua Pura. Our job was to clean out the water bottles (the big 5 gallon ones that go on water coolers) and refill them. I seemed to prove adept at the filling station and over the course of two days I must have filled at least 300 of them. My arms were quite tired at the end of it.

There aren’t any other volunteers here besides two kids who are here for a few months as part of their schooling in agricultural and environmental studies. They have a very small English vocabulary and their Spanish is virtually impossible for me to understand. Typical teenage boys, mumbling away. They are also very shy so when we meet at meal times, we generally eat in an eerie silence, that is, after we say grace.

I have to say I am relieved to be leaving here tomorrow as I’m decidedly bored but I think it has been good to have a week of work, away from alcohol and cigarettes and to catch up on some rest. One thing about travelling like this is that you are never anywhere that is comfortable like home. There is never a big comfy couch you can curl up in with a nice hot cup of tea. After a few months on the road, you end up with a constant, nagging weariness that will only really go once you are home. I’m not complaining, but it is just one of the realities when you are sleeping in strange beds every night wondering what, or who that noise is, and waking up, doing the quick mental calculations of where you might possibly be now.

While at the farm, after work, I have been pretty much confined to my net-covered bed since the mosquitoes are unbearable and I was eaten alive the first few days. It has been good to read about a book a day but I now crave outside stimulation and conversation.

The other great thing about my week on the farm is that it has given me an insight to the type of volunteer work I would like to do (or, rather, wouldn’t like to do). It has also highlighted the realities of an aid-dependent society and I had a good conversation with Tara about that. When I was working with Gladys and Arturo, we were hauling the nuts back and I suggested they might be better off with a work horse, that way they could carry more and not kill their backs. No, she said, we need a car!

It’s funny how you get organisations requesting volunteers, and you pay for the pleasure, generally speaking. What this often means is that you’re giving someone the opportunity to take a day off. So you’re not necessarily expanding capacity, just giving someone the opportunity to have a break. Perhaps that is just as important, who really knows. At the end of the week though I feel as though I’ve done something worthwhile.