A Gringo’s Tale: Picking Coffee and Near-Death in Pitalito Pt.1
The small passenger plane carrying some 30-odd people burst through the clouds, and the sprawling majesty of the Andes appeared before my eyes. A mix of snow-caps and rolling green hills stretching for miles seemingly in all directions, and a thick wool blanket of billowing clouds sandwiched our small craft.
We weren’t but a few hundred meters away from their peaks at various moments, causing me some certain stress, but I trusted that the unknown pilots at the helm knew what they were doing, so I enjoyed the views as best I could.
A stomach cramp brewed in my gullet as a British photographer over to my right translated what the Colombian pilot was saying over the loudspeaker. “We’re almost there.” He screamed, as if to nobody in particular.
Out in the distance, in a clearing in the valley, appeared a small-looking development. At long last, Pitalito.
I had discovered a website a few months later called “workaway.io”. If you haven’t heard of it previously, I suggest taking some time to explore. It’s a website where people all over the world can offer work in exchange for food and lodging, with specific accommodations and hours to be negotiated on a case-by-case basis between the hosts and the traveler.
I had done several during my three-month stay in Spain and had recently discovered an adventure in Colombia of all places which I just had to experience. It was a small coffee farm nestled in the mountainside just outside of the small town of Pitalito. The pictures of the farm were so quaint and beautiful, and the surrounding nature of Colombia drew me in. I simply had to go and see for myself.
I had fantasies of living out the rest of my days on that farm. The beauty and natural freedom and kindness of my hosts were overwhelming. The smells of coffee roasting, the roosters crowing, and the laughter of the family I was staying with filled me with a blend of sensations I’d never experienced before. But it wasn’t meant to last…
I began my stint of work the first week. We woke up at 6 am, I wrapped myself in layers of shirts, jackets, and scarves, for though it would be 80 degrees and humid, the mosquitoes and midges loved to swarm the coffee plant fields, and protection from those menaces took precedence.
I had to wrap my head in a t-shirt to keep the midges away from my face. I was paired with two local Colombian workers, modern-day campesinos, who had spent their whole lives in the coffee fields, their fingers molded by the stems, dirt, and berries. From the foot of the mountain, they strapped a bucket around my waist, turned, and began an almost sprint up the side of the mountain.
Coffee grows best on a slope in a particular kind of climate, and this particular slope of this mountain went up at an almost a 90-degree angle at times… but I had to keep up. We ran uphill on a path that had a width of about a shoebox, with thick spiny brush to the right and a precipitous drop to the left, but full speed ahead we went.
Finally, we reached the appropriate picking spot which, to me, seemed no different than the countless fields we had just passed through, but I trusted the men that knew the lands as well as the landscapes of their own bodies by this point. They gave no instructions, they hardly even told me where I should pick- I suppose it didn’t matter so much looking back, but I wanted some instructions, I wanted to do a good job.
Not realizing I spoke some decent Spanish at the time, they would simply wave a hand in a general direction signaling where my work-station would be and then would disappear through a mess of lush coffee trees to do picking of their own.
The job would be easy were it not for everything taking place on a near 90-degree slope. One would have to anchor or wedge themselves between the coffee plants and the mountain, digging your feet into the earth to ensure you don’t go tumbling down the mountain as one reaches for a bushel of berries to pick.
The ripe ones were either bright red or a kind of matte yellow. The ripe ones popped off the stem fairly easily, some requiring a bit of a twist, others not budging, and others exploding in your fingers as you gave them just a bit too much of a tug in the wrong direction.
I would ravage the plant for as many ripe berries as I could and move on to the next tree, swatting midges and sweating through my windbreaker.
I would stop every now and then and take in the surroundings, the immense nature, and magnificent views from all around from the vantage point of the mountainside. I breathed in deeply a pure air, freshly pumped from the leaves and grass of the surrounding flora and mixed by the mountain breeze.
We worked for 2 hours before reconvening for breakfast which doña Lucy (the boss) had prepared for the three of us. A sandwich, a piece of fruit, and, of course, a thermos filled with fresh coffee.
Upon meeting up with the other two workers, I saw they had filled their buckets literally to the brim with coffee cherries… I had barely covered the bottom of my bucket by that time. The two got a good laugh out of that. “Que has estado haciendo todo este tiempo hombre?” Carmello, one of two workers, said as they laughed and helped me unstrap the bucket from my waist and dump my berries into a burlap sack for safekeeping.
I took the opportunity to get to know the two guys as best I could — considering we would be co-workers for the foreseeable future. I didn’t want to be a burden, I wanted to be as productive and helpful as I possibly could.
One worker, whose name escapes me, was tall and gaunt but extremely strong as if his skeleton and muscles were formed over years to be as dense and efficient as possible. He was partly deaf and had been abandoned at age 7 by his parents, and with 6 younger siblings, was left to take over the household… I am not embellishing.
From that young age, he took to the coffee fields to begin his life as a picker, and here he was 30 years later. Formed by the mountains and the craft of coffee picking, when I watched him, it was as if his fingers all moved with a mind of their own, snaking their way through the stems and plucking the berries with such ease, moving in ways I’d never seen fingers move before. It was as if he had become a machine whose singular purpose was this. He was a true master of his craft, a 3rd-degree black belt of berry picking. It was amazing to watch, and it was no wonder I couldn’t keep up.
“Hey, how much do they pay you guys by the way” I screamed from three feet away, assuring he would hear me.
“$7 ma o meno” “Oh wow per hour that’s pretty amazing!”, I quickly replied.
“No señor, $7 todo el dia…” Carmelo interjected.
My head started to spin… this is hard work, very hard work, and the fruits of it for these men is less than $1 per hour. “This is a different world”, I thought. I had never conceived it to be possible to live off of so little, but this is what these men did every day of their lives. This is why some take the risk to leave and make the journey up north to my country.
After breakfast, we worked another three to four hours. I did my best to improve upon my technique and keep up with the other two workers to no avail. By the end of the shift, I had filled up my sack about a quarter of the way, while each of theirs was full to the point of overflowing.
We sprint up the mountain and, of course, we sprint down the mountain.
Bucket strapped to the waist, a sack of berries slung over the shoulder, we launched ourselves down the mountain one foot in front of the other. One wrong step could mean a tumble down the mountainside and certain injury or worse…
The other two get lost up ahead in the distance, they almost seem to forget I exist. I round the bend, the path narrows my momentum carrying me downhill ever faster, my right foot lands askew, the land dislocates beneath me, I’m going down…
I drop my sack, thrust my hands out, and toss my momentum forward, landing on my chest and bucket, the right side of my body hanging over the edge of the precipice, but enough of me firmly on the path to keep from tumbling over the edge.
Carmelo, the one who could hear, stopped and turned to see if I was alright. I dusted myself off, and before I could stand up, he was off again down the mountain. I didn’t take offense to any of the dismissive behaviors of my other two workers, they helped me along just enough to make sure I could do some work and not die in the process, and they went about their business- they had their battles to deal with.
I made it down the mountain, drenched, dirty, bitten… exhausted. I thrust my sack on the processing bench where one of the kids was there helping to process the berries. She laughed at the size of my minuscule sack of berries, “eso es todo?” she derided as she dumped the contents into the processor.
My coffee-picking work was done for the day. I would do some odds and ends around the farm the rest of the day, but the hard work was over. I had a shower next to my living quarters that sourced its waters from the icy peaks of the Andes and produced water so frigid it would pierce my soul and stop my heart, but weirdly, that was just what one needed after a shift like that up on the mountain.
My dreams of living out my days on the farm dissipated that day. Especially after I attempted to log on to my computer to teach an English class and the WiFi turned my classroom into a potato. I couldn’t even get past introductions before the Zoom room crashed and imploded. Coffee picking was not going to be my career path, and eventually, I was going to have to move onward…
To what exactly, was the question…
