Beans For Hope – Hope in Every Cup

I am a third generation coffee farmer, born and raised in Guatemala. My origins in coffee go back to the 1930’s when my grandparents Felix and Rosalia sold their most precious possessions, a horse and cow, to buy a small amount of land to grow coffee. The son of a Spaniard and a local woman, my grandfather grew up very poor. He did not wear any shoes until he was older and never learned how to write or read. He worked really hard and bought several small pieces of land to cultivate the coffee that he named Finca Morelia. He helped a lot of people along the way and was the first person in town to own a motor vehicle, a run down pick up truck. People would come day or night knocking on his door when they would get sick and he would kindly drive them trough the dirt roads to the nearest clinic or hospital, usually a couple of hours away. The name of the town is La Industria, a small village of approximately 2,000 small coffee farmers located in the mountains of the state of San Marcos, near the Pacific Ocean.

Through my grandfather’s kind and visionary leadership the town grew and developed, until the terrible civil war came. Things turned really rough with several village neighbors getting killed and many others “disappeared.” Many people fled the village escaping the violence and destruction, including many of my family members. The coffee farms were abandoned for a long time and my grandfather passed away in 1993, almost as poor as when he started but loved by the whole town.

My family moved to Guatemala City and several years ago my mother Coni, one my grandfather’s 10 children, decided that it was time to begin cultivating the land that my grandfather loved and worked his whole life. So she went back to La Industria and began cleaning the farm. She prepared the land and planted new coffee trees. After a couple of years harvest time came again. My mother, sister and my father’s dad began picking the ripe beans even under the unexpected heavy rain of an unseasonably warm October. They took the bags, full with red coffee beans, on their shoulders and walked along the hilly roads that lead to the main town. Having arrived at a local buyer, they anxiously waited to see how much they would be compensated for their hard work while the man in charge placed the heavy bags on the scale.

I was working as a doctor at Saint Louis University at that time and had no direct involvement with the process, except for the continuous moral support to my mom. I gave her a call one night when she got back to Guatemala city as they had no telephones in La Industria then. When I asked her how much she got for her beans she started crying and told me she got the equivalent of 14 cents for a pound of coffee beans. Sad and angry tears rolled from my eyes. I could not help to think of my grandfather working all his life raising 10 kids on this kind of revenue. Then I thought of the entire village and how hard they worked all year, how proud they were of their coffee and yet no hope of improving their living conditions.

Fourteen cents of a dollar per pound!. No wonder why people are leaving the town and migrating to the north in hope for a better future. Our village is not the only one to be affected by this phenomenon, there are thousands and thousands of little coffee fincas owned by small coffee growers that are being affected by this.

That’s when I got involved, I knew I had to do something about it. I began investigating the coffee market and figuring out ways out of this poverty cycle. I looked into getting certified by Fair Trade and traveled to Belgium and met with some representatives of the European Fairtrade Federation, unfortunately it did not seem like a viable option for us or for many small coffee growers who share in our dilemma.

After several years of trying different venues and with the help and support of several good friends in the United States, we decided to bring our own coffee beans and those of other small coffee farmers like us directly to the market, opening a coffee roasting company in Saint Louis, MO. The name of our company is Beans For Hope. Here is what we want to accomplish:

• Find a better market for that great coffee that comes from our own coffee finca and from other small coffee growers in similar situations in Guatemala.
• With some of the profits obtained from selling our coffee, develop basic infrastructure in our towns: health clinics, develop libraries at local schools, improve the roads, etc.
• Provide technical support to small farmers like us in order to improve the quality of our coffee.
• Implement environmentally friendly farming practices.
• Partner with non-profit organizations in the United States and share some of our profits with them in exchange for sponsoring our coffee.

When you buy a pound of Beans For Hope Coffee, the first thing you will notice is the beautiful bag it comes in. We were blessed to have met a group of Mayan women from another village in Guatemala, most of them widows from the war or left behind by their husbands who emigrated to the north. They are developing a co-op for textiles and produce beautiful handwoven bags that we will be using to promote our product. In exchange they will receive a higher than local market price and support from our organization to bring several other of their products to the US market.

We are facing many different challenges, including the expensive and complex process of exporting the coffee beans directly from Guatemala, farms that have been abandoned and not taken care of for years that need a lot of attention and money invested to get them up and running again. There exists some mistrust and skepticism from localfarmers, justified after more than 30 years of civil war. We believe that we can overcome any obstacle and are working hard to bring directly to our customers the best of our harvests with a social conscience.

I dedicate this work to a great man, my grandfather Felix who worked the land his whole life and lived a humble life, raised a family with high moral standards and shared whatever he had with who ever needed it.

Wilman Ortega