Hunger Strikes

Largartillo, Nicaragua
16th October 2009

Full Flavour Behaviour

The SolCafe beneficio stands beside the main road into Managua, a collection of dispersed concrete buildings and warehouses surrounding a large concrete patio and field that is completely covered with coffee beans drying in the sun; its here that the farmers of the CECOCAFEN cooperative bring their coffee beans from the surrounding region to be weighed and sold. Emerging through the front gate with Rachel, with whom I’ve been lucky enough to spend the last week understanding more about the world of ethical trading, we commence a tour of all the buildings to greet everyone on-site and search for Rachel’s partner Simon who, it turns out, is being shown large and complicated coffee processing machines in one of the warehouses by a proud figure of authority. We’re here to do a tasting, comparing the coffee that the owners of the cooperative are currently selling to the national market against a range of other coffees that Rachel has taken from the local supermarket shelves.

Assembled in the beneficio’s coffee lab and surrounded by the rich odour of toasted and ground beans, Rachel, Simon and I are joined by the resident tasters and a couple of guys who are responsible for the beneficio’s nationally distributed consumer coffee brand, Café Nica. Solemnly, cups are placed around a rotating table in groups of four for each of the six varieties that we will perform a blind taste test with, and ground coffee is distributed among the cups. We are duly handed marking sheets, and instructed how to engage in the process of evaluating a cup.

The first step is to describe the odour of the dry ground coffee. Following instructions, I place my hand over the top of the cup and sniff deeply through the small aperture between my thumb and finger. Owing to my enthusiasm for the exercise a notable amount of coffee goes up my nose and while I try I ignore the tickling in the back of my nasal cavity I focus on the list of adjectives in Spanish on my sheet, which include vocabulary such as ‘nutty’ and ‘floral’. The table spins in front of me and I realise that I have no time to ponder the poetics of my cup; there are another twenty three to go. I frantically sniff and write, extending my nose to the very limits of its abilities.

Next the granules are soaked, with boiled water poured over them, and a fresh round of sniffing commences. Each cup is ‘broken’ by stirring the layer of floating granules on the top of the water with a spoon, causing them to sink and release an aroma. I succeed in not inhaling any hot coffee through my wary nostrils.

It’s time for the tasting. Rachel shows us how it’s done with a cup of water for practise, sharply sucking in the liquid from a spoon with a slightly open mouth before swilling the liquid around the mouth and spitting it out into a big metal bin beside the revolving table. We try with varying degrees of success, and are firmly put in our place when one of the in house tasters demonstrates the technique, producing a sound when taking the liquid like a sheet of heavy material ripping. We are all suitably impressed.

Table revolutions begin anew, and this time I juggle the descriptions of the acidity, body and flavour of the coffee (earthy, buttery, full, bitter…) and I finish the tasting with a scruffy sheet marked seemingly randomly with descriptive words and give a rather faltering explanation to the group in Spanish as to my decisions on the best and worst coffees. I’ve fortunately managed to avoid insulting the beneficio’s coffee (it came up at number two of six), but sadly my Neanderthal palette fell foul of the cheapest and nastiest sample, which in a fit of confusion I decided was worth of the top spot.

It’s all a very interesting exercise and fascinating when you start to think about the almost infinite variations of flavours possible by tinkering with the different types of beans, blends and various stages of processing, but to be honest I’m a long way off being able to brandish lavish descriptions of something that I usually just use as a tool to pull me out of my early morning semi-comas.

Matagalpa, Nicaragua
16th October 2009

You've Been a Very Bad Berry

I've just been introduced to the most vile fruit in existence. The nancite berry has absolutely no positive characteristics whatsoever; it has a mustardy yellow colour, chalky texture when eaten and bears an odour remarkably simular to vomit.

Rach and Simon, my able and willing guides in Nicaragua, warned me of the properties of this hell-berry, but persuaded me that it would be a suitably character building experience to try it. After a bit of nudging, I purchased a nice big glass of liquified nancite and proceeded to try and pack as much of it away as possible before the inevitable after-effects set in. Rach and Simon watched me from across the table with interest. I made it halfway down the glass before an aftertaste developed similar to that when one throws up in ones own mouth causing me to jettison the rest of the drink, making my excuses.

Surprisingly, the owner of the cafe told us that this was his most popular beverage; I suppose there's no accounting for taste...

Esteli, Nicaragua
6th October 2009

Transvestites, War Stories and Lovely Rooftop Views

Arriving with a sore post-virus head in Leon, deposited at a petrol station on the outskirts, Lou and I wasted no time in installing ourselves in a central hostel and trundling around the centre of town, eager for new sights and sounds.

We were in luck, beset upon all sides by a long and riotous procession celebrating some saint or another, around which the townspeople flocked in great quantities. Town bells clanged in glorious dissonance and a string of midday drunks and, unexpectedly, transvestites, trailed behind the main procession as it wound its way about town, disappearing from sight and ear-splittingly reappearing again suddenly as soon as Lou and I decided to sit somewhere and engage in conversation.

Seeking quieter experiences, we committed ourselves to the Sandinista Revolution Museum, housed understandably rather proudly in a grand and steadily decaying building that formed the last stronghold of the National Guard in Leon before it was toppled in 1979. Of the grand rooms leading from the sweeping central atrium beyond the front door populated with latent Nicaraguan men, only one was in active use as the museum. The walls of the room were covered with a selection of newspaper cuttings, shoddy photo-copies, pages ripped from books and dog eared maps affixed by sellotape, forming the most haphazard historical display that I can recall within recent memory.

We were led around the selection by an ex-guerrilla, an amiable but serious fellow who gestured at everything with a trusty pointing stick, giving us a high speed tour of the modern history of Nicaragua from the assassination of General Sandino, who had waged relentless guerrilla war against US military forces since their occupation in 1912 and finally driven them out of Nicaragua in 1933, by the US military trained Nicaraguan National Guard to the relentless war waged against the Sandinista government post-revolution by the (yes, you’ve guessed it) US financed contra-revolutionaries in the years of the hard-line Regan administration. The whole bloody and brutal history lasted for about 60 years, and had much credit to give the foreign policy of our favourite international superpower. It was almost as if I was listening to an echo of El Salvadorian fortunes, the fortunes of an entire country retarded by the best part of a century for the gains of …what, exactly?

Our tour progressing beyond the high ceilings of the room containing grainy photo after grainy photo of young, serious faces that never saw an end to their conflict, and we climbed the stairs up to the roof. Clanking gingerly over a worryingly thin layer of corrugated tin riveted to beams beneath by our confidently striding guide, were led around a selection of fine views of Leon. We stared from the rooftop in the warmth of the late afternoon sun over towards the distant volcanoes that spiked out of the horizon like the cardiogram of a heart murmur patient. I asked our guide how he felt about giving the tours. After a brief pause he replied,

“It’s good for me to talk about it. It is hard, but it’s like a kind of therapy.”

The heavy beige sunlight picked the wrinkles and creases out on his face and I reflected, rather sadly from our grand perch overlooking the sprawling town, on how many people this man had lost. I though about how much had been torn away from him without him being able to do anything about it, and why he had been forced to experience such a hard existence. I tried to understand, but I couldn’t.

Leon, Nicaragua
4th October 2009

Coffee Bean Connoisseurs

Selecting only the finest beans for the harvest with Marlon in the coffee finca, Sontule.

Marlon lives and works with his family in Sontule in the Miraflor region, a couple of hours outside Esteli in the North West of Nicaragua, where buses only occasionally venture along the bumpy, suspension destroying road. Most inhabitants get there and back by horseback, or foot. A selection of children, dogs (one of which is confusingly called Chicken), chickens, the house pig (called, you've guessed it, Dog) and family members wander in and out over the dirt floors of his home over the course of the day.

Marlon (on the right) is a lovely chap with a great big smile and one of the key members of the local coffee cooperative and tourism project, which in their respective ways aim to bring a sustainable income to the community.

Lou and I visited for a couple of days on the tourism program after the reccommendations of friends Simon and Rachel, as Simon is teaching English in the community school a couple of days a week. Pottering around the stunning landscape of rural Nicaragua, empty out of season coffee beneficios (processing plants) and the various houses of relatives with Marlon, we were absolutely delighted with the friendliness of the people and tried as best we could to adjust to simple country living in our homestay, campesino-style for the weekend.

Sontule, Miraflor, Nicaragua
3rd October 2009

Losing All the Best Bits...Of Your Country

Soft spoken and rather unassuming, you wouldn’t really think much of Ron Brennenman. Until, that is, you find out one of the countless facts that seem to nonchalantly crop up, like when the FMLN guerrillas organised a major offensive on his kitchen table during the civil war. Ron (seen here modelling a very fashionable cowboy hat and the even more fashionable Whitaker Sisters) has seen El Salvador go to pieces during the 80s, and then try and pull itself back together again, with fairly lacklustre results.

This has, in a nutshell, prompted him to start Amun Shea, an educational project run out of Perquin up in the remote wooded hills of the North East. The project is an inspiring attempt to provide a heavily subsidised private education for the local children which is not subject to the fairly unsatisfactory rigours of the public school system. The short term aim, which is to generate significant academic success in comparison to national results and thus force education reform, is well underway. The much harder long term goal of building and retaining desperately needed community leaders to stop the incessant traffic of talented individuals out of the country (who mostly head to the US illegally looking for a better life) is proving much more elusive; results, if any, won’t be seen for years.

It is incredible to hear Ron describe what is happening in El Salvador, and to see quite clearly how the country is a shell, hollowed out by war, leaving the resulting wasteland of possibility for the population. With the option of living hand to mouth indefinitely in a country that stalls its progress of international development or leaving for faraway lands of golden opportunity, which would you choose?

Perquin, El Salvador
30th September 2009

Perquin

Tucked away in the North East of El Salvador, Perkin is a small town with a big past. The centre of operations of the guerrillas during the civil war, it was deserted for almost fifteen years and saw fierce fighting. The war museum, a fairly breathless climb up from the town centre, gives a fairly harrowing perspective from the guerrilla Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN) side of the conflict, with countless photos of the casualties of the conflict placed alongside heavy artillery weapons that were either captured from the US sponsored National Guard. Our guide Carlos, an ex-major who served for the duration of the war on the side of the FMLN, tells us that the turning point in the war was when US manufactured mobile surface to air missile launchers arrived from Nicaragua, a keepsake of the contra-revolutionary conflict, allowing retaliation against the constant air bombardments that were levelling civilian villages, assumed to be enemy targets; in short, US funded weapons against US funded weapons.

The surrounding villages also bear the scars of the conflict, one of the most recognised being in El Mozote, about a half hour drive from Perquin. In 1981 on December 11, Salvadorian armed forces trained by the US military killed at least 1000 civilians in an anti-guerrilla campaign. Outside the village church is a memorial garden in which the local guide tells us they discovered the bodies of 147 children below the age of 12 buried in a mass grave.

It is amost impossible to comprehend acts of barbarity of this scale, no matter how impactful the monuments erected to remind us of events. It is also equally difficult to understand the motivations of the Regan administration during the 80s, and the far reaching effects of its foriegn policy that resulted in escalating death tolls of civilian populations in numerous central American countries, and the practical removal of their civil liberties, something the US tirelessly contradicts itself with via its constitution.

Perquin, El Salvador
29th September 2009