Saturday, September 22, 2007

Coffee Cooperatives, Caipirinhas, and Carrot Cake

So, as you saw in last week's post, I am definitely settling in here, and it has only gotten better since last week. I have been pretty busy with quite a few endeavors, personal and professional. First let me mention that I have made quite a bit of headway on an article that I would like to submit sometime this year (this might not be interesting to you, but it definitely is to me, since it was always so difficult to sit down and write in Kansas, what with teaching, classes, and, uh, bars...). I learned to appreciate the "downtime" I had in the last few weeks, since it allowed me to get ahead on that article, as well as some other stuff.

I suspect that I will be a bit busier from here on out. I made my first visit to Guaxupé, Minas Gerais (the home of Cooxupé Cooperative, that I will be working with) and Monte Santo de Minas, a smaller city and the home of the cooperative núcleo where I will probably be focusing most of my data collection. I was in those two places for a day and a half meeting with various cooperative officials and discussing possible collaborative efforts with them. I must say that what we ended up agreeing on was not what I imagined we would, exactly, but this is because my own lack of knowledge about the cooperative led me to be very surprised by everything, I mean everything, I found there. I knew they were a well-established and highly-developed coffee cooperative, but the reality that I found was much, much more complex and complicated than I imagined, even after only a day! What was hard for me was how different the reality of this cooperative is from that of CECOCAFEN in Nicaragua, where I worked for three years; every assumption I ever had about coffee production, coffee markets, social justice, small and large farmers, must be questioned and assessed anew here in Brazil. I never thought Minas would be like Matagalpa, I just didn't expect so much contrast, different successes and different struggles entirely. I have a lot to learn here and I will have a lot of opportunity to learn, as I work collecting data on socio-economic and environmental conditions on farms, in relation to the norms of various coffee certifications, and as I study the process the cooperative is going through in order to achieve fair trade certification for its small-scale members, which make up 80% of its membership of almost 12,000 coffee farmers. I will write more about that later, since it is really incredible what they are doing. I go back to Monte Santo de Minas this coming Wednesday, and will accompany a few of the cooperative managers to Belo Horizonte (the capital of the state of Minas Gerais) to attend a Symposium on Social Responsibility in Coffee Production there on Friday and Saturday, and I think I will go back to Monte Santo on Monday or Tuesday next.

In other news...I won third place in a Caipirinha-making Contest last Sunday, as part of an unlikely team made up of myself, Sandra from France, and Ismael from Iran, who is here doing some research on sugarcane-processing or something like that. A caipirinha is a mixed drink that is made from pinga (cane alcohol, also known as cachaça), limes, sugar and ice. A glass of it is traditionally passed from person to person, making it a communal cocktail. We named our team "Babylonia"--I think we meant to name it "Babel", but we were already well on our way to being drunk off caipirinhas by the time our team was to compete (everyone but Ismael, who doesn't drink or speak Portuguese). Third place!! Everyone there was a little surprised, since none of us really knew how to make caipirinhas clásicas, which was the category we competed in. The second photo is our team Babylonia-Babel; the first is the table of judges trying the various submissions (two-thirds of the judges panel were professors from FEAGRI!). The third photo is--you guessed it--E.T.! That special alien made an appearance at a parade for the opening of an art festival that passed the street in front of the venue where the caipirinha contest was happening.

Otherwise, Sandra and I have managed to do the YMCA in a bar with a group of friends from FEAGRI (see photo at right--I think they are doing the ¨M¨), get lost on an expedition downtown via public transportation, visit Parque Don Pedro (the largest shopping mall in Latin America! Hooray!), and basically have a good time while getting something done. Mostly.

I had a little saudade (longing, nostalgia) for things American this morning (shocking, no?), so I got the verve up to make a carrot cake. My first Brazilian carrot cake! At right is a photo of the cake, which is excellent, by the way, although not so pretty! Pure butter...yum...

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