Coffee Addict

Leslie Palomares - 05/23/2019

Today, we met two organizations in Antigua, De La Gente, and Common Hope. Keara, from De La Gente, gave us a tour of a coffee farm in Antigua together with Gabriel.

Eight years ago, Gabriel only had one hectare where he planted coffee. Now, he has 13 hectares where he grows up to 4,000 coffee beans a year to export to countries like Canada, the United States, and the Netherlands. Gabriel received a loan from De La Gente to buy more land for his coffee and so he could leave his other job as a waiter in Guatemala City, and be closer to his wife and four children. In addition, he tours approximately 2 hours to teach foreigners about the complete process of making coffee in Guatemala. Afterward, Gabriel invited us to his house where his wife cooked us a delicious meal with chicken, avocado, and Jamaica tea. We also drank some homemade coffee which was amazing before leaving to Common Hope.

Common Hope is an organization that provides education, health, food, and shelter, among other things, to the poorest families in Guatemala. Their dream is to promote education in Guatemala from children until they finish high school so that when they leave school, they can get a good job in the city and break the cycle of poverty in which their families have lived for so long. Common Hope receives money from donations from the United States and often a child supported by them is sponsored for a family abroad. The family abroad begins to help the child from a very young age until he graduates from high school, and can come to visit him or her in Guatemala. As you can see, the child and the family from abroad create a very strong bond since they have a close relationship for more than 10 years in some cases. Emily is a Canadian woman who started as an intern and now works for Common Hope; she also gave us a tour of the establishment. Of all the information she gave us, I thought the following are good to share. Slightly more than 80% of the workers in Common Hope are Guatemalan, and the rest are international. It seems important to me that Common Hope has created that special bond with the families of Guatemala showing them that they are here to give them more jobs and not taking them away from the locals. Several Common Hope graduates end up working for the company and helping other children and families thrive. The other point that I found very interesting was that the houses built by Common Hope staff and families are transportable and can be disassembled as a puzzle and assembled back in a couple of days.

Both organizations showed us an interest in nothing more than the families of Guatemala. In certain ways, they share the GLOBE mission. GLOBE strives to alleviate poverty in poor countries like these two organizations in Guatemala. GLOBE focuses on helping women, single mothers, or families who have suffered some tragedy in their lives as well as De La Gente and Common Hope. Both organizations and GLOBE do not seek to donate money to families to live well for a couple of days but look for hard-working people in undeveloped countries, with scarce resources to succeed or imperceptibly helped by the government, to reward and empower them to achieve their dreams and be the best version of themselves.