It’s coffee harvest time in the mountains of Nicaragua.
One young man traveled from his home near the Miskito coast, inland up the Coco River which borders Honduras and then on from there by bus to Selva Negra north of Matagalpa to pick coffee at the Hammonia Farm. He spoke to me in halting Spanish, maybe partly from shyness and partly because his native tongue is an Indian dialect.
I was on a coffee tour there last month with my husband and two close friends visiting us from their home in France. We stayed at the Selva Negra Ecolodge, in a room on the lake, and took their Coffee Tour, Nature Tour and Sustainable Farm Tour while there.
John and I had stayed at Selva Negra last Spring. We loved the cool mountain air. The miles of hiking trails. The lake at our feet. The restaurant. The geese.
This time we took the tours. It was as if we were suddenly, unexpectedly, diving deep into warm, clear waters.
I was impressed. We all were impressed by what we saw and learned and felt.
For me it was the kind of impressed that moves my soul. That makes me wonder what I’ve done with my life. That makes me feel grandness, possibilities, excitement on a scale that I remember from my heady college days and early career when notions of Saving the World were not only intoxicating but, for however briefly, made real.
Experiencing Hammonia Farm and Selva Negra dipped my toes back into that sweet nectar of awe.
Their community of workers. The clinic, the school, the communal kitchen and gardens for the workers. The waste water recycling, the composting, the organic coffee fields, the coffee bean hull separator, the lodging, the chapel, the restaurant, and the miles of densely forested hiking trails.
They use the discarded coffee hulls as cooking fuel under their kitchen pots. They use the methane produced by cow and human waste for cooking fuel too.
My mind danced between contemplating the depth of history – the German gold miner whose wife quietly planted the first coffee beans in Nicaragua while her husband was searching the hills for gold – to the logistical wonder of juggling so many systems (oh, to be the bookkeeper of such an enterprise!), to observing the muddy paw print of a jaguar in the jungle, back to the coffee pickers who, like the migrating birds in the forest, had traveled from afar to pick berries and in so doing to earn their keep.
The coffee harvesters are so freakin strong. We visited them during their lunch break as well as at the end of their work day when they were weighing in their harvest. One man’s job was to lift the 100-lb bags onto his shoulder, climb a ladder and toss it into a truck.
It gets cold up there. Take a jacket and long pants. And be prepared to be Wowed.
The harvest lasts from November through February. The EcoLodge is open year round.
