May 25, 2011
As you may remember, I live in the coffee growing mountains of Western El Salvador. Most of the land around here is coffee fields, all of which export coffee to the major coffee corporations around the world, including Starbucks. Therefore you would expect the coffee that my host family makes by shelling, drying and roasting the coffee the old fashion way to be absolutely delicious. You would be wrong. The coffee they serve is watery and ranges in taste from smoky to kind of like caramel on good days. Nothing like you want and expect coffee to taste like. I had assumed that this was either because they use only the leftovers from the coffee they export or the cowboy style they use to prepare it. Nonetheless, I drank it with three meals a day and got used to it. The other day I finally learned what is going on with this stuff. My host family let it slip that they use half coffee and half corn to make it. That’s right. CORN. I was outraged, to say the least. It was like a cruel joke. They said it was too bitter without corn. “Are you all insane?!?” I demanded. I have since calmed down a bit but have decided to make get a coffee pot and make my own. I still can’t believe they took the thing they do best, producing world class coffee, and completely ruin it with corn. Unbelievable!
Yesterday I had some gringo visitors here in my site. Matt and Liz were working for an NGO trying to quantify carbon emission reduction from using the fuel efficient stoves that I sold a few months ago. They came out with the bosses of the stove company to ask people questions about their stoves and take pictures. I found a house we could visit that said they used the stove everyday. When it came time for the woman to demonstrate how she makes tortillas on it, we could not get the fire to light for about 15 minutes, all the while the stove billowed smoke everywhere. So much for efficiency. Apparently we were using pieces of wood that were to big. Finally got it going, and we cooked some delicious tortillas and ate them with cheese. All the while Matt and Liz snapped pictures with what must have been thousand dollar cameras. It is always strange to see stone age methods juxtaposed with modern technology. I see this kind of thing daily, such as women pausing their daily grinding of corn on a rock slab to answer their Blackberry. What a crazy world we live in.

Also, I am still looking for donations for the women´ empowerment camp, check out the last post if you missed it.