Honduras Trip (Part I)
Back in March we had the good fortune to take a trip to Honduras as we started our new coffee roasting company. On our brief journey, we were able to visit with a coffee plantation cooperative, local farmers and a community development organization known as the MAMA Project Inc that provides medical treatment to malnourished and abused families. Though we had high expectations for the trip itself, we really had no idea what to expect once we arrived. The following is a synopsis of our travels and exploits (not in the pejorative sense of course):
La Central - The best kept secret in the community development world.
Just after three hours of getting into Tegucigalpa (the capital of Honduras, and also the most dangerous city to fly into apparently), we visited an organization known as La Central de Cooperitiva (La Central). This organization works with hundreds of coffee co-ops throughout Honduras to help them get the best price for their coffee beans. Essentially, La Central enables coffee growers to act as exporters of their own crop. Normally, raw coffee beans are bought from a farmer’s plantation for a very low price. Once purchased, the raw coffee beans pass through many middlemen before they are exported at a much higher price. La Central bypasses this system by directly exporting coffee from the farmer’s plantation, avoiding all the middlemen. Pretty simple idea, right? We thought so too.
As if that was not enough, La Central also works with the coffee growing communities to develop more efficient farming methods and a higher standard of living. We were overwhelmed by the number of programs and amount of work being done to support these rural communities. We learned lesson number one from this part of the trip, which is we will never be as successful at community development in Honduras as an organization like La Central. We realized very quickly that living and breathing with a community is necessary in order to understand its needs and how to address them.
La Central has spent years building relationships with the farming communities. As a result, they intimately know the farmers and their situation. La Central is able to help the farmers in a way that we cannot because they understand their way of life, and more importantly, they understand the people. They are able to help the farmers take ownership of their situation and partner with them to make changes. So, after one day with La Central, we began to ask a different question as a company. Instead of asking how we could start a community development program in Honduras, we began to ask how we could support organizations like La Central who are already in community with the farmers and their families.
