Gringa in the finca

As I continue to introduce myself to community members, I always explain that I´m looking for activities to do each day with them, so I´m not sitting inside all day. I ask them to invite me to events, or over to their houses to learn how to cook chicha de pifa, anything at all, I say, because I still know so little about their lives. When I told my host-father that I would go with him to his finca and harvest cacao, he interrupted saying, ¨Cati, wait.¨I waited, indulging his dramatic pause. ´´If I invite you to the finca, you will come and work with us?¨ His expression said it all. He can´t believe the things this gringa says sometimes.

Two days later, I was hiking with them to their other house (por alla arriba), close to their farmland. Finca is translated as farm or field, but the idea of a finca is quite unique to Panama. No visible boundaries exist, though everyone knows exactly where their finca begins and ends, and how many hectares they have. Nothing is planted neatly, in fact, you´d never know you were hiking through farmland if you weren´t looking for it.

We spent the afternoon, harvesting through the rain and fighting with the mud. One person knocked the cacao from the trees with a large stick, with a pick attached to the end, while I and my host-sister followed behind, loading them into our chakaras (woven bags made by Ngobes). We pick up every piece, even ones that seem like they were rotted through or picked over by birds. We shook them to see if the seeds moved inside, and if they did, it meant there was still something harvestable inside. They laughed while I wrapped the handle around my head and carried the weight on my back like they do. I had been nervous at first, imagining it would put a tremendous stress on my head and neck, but indeed, it does not, and is really the only way carry a heavy weight practically through narrow trails and muck.

Sometimes I would find myself grumbling, that I was soaked to the bone, had fallen at least 150 times in the mud, or pricked myself on one of the many spiny trees that are oh-so-tempting to grab when you´re trying to climb up an impossibly slippery slope. I would rack my brain wondering how they never fall, and do all of this in bare feet and skirts. And then I would notice a giant, towering tree, left over from what used to be primary forest. Or a neon-green and black frog would dart out from under a log. It´s easy to get frustrated sometimes, thinking about how there might not be water to bathe with when I get home, or that I feel sick from eating a strange food, but I never let myself stay that way for long. There are too many things to appreciate. I hope I never stop seeing how beautiful it is here.

We piled all of the day´s harvest among a bunch of logs, where they would be left until the next day, when they would be peeled, dried, and eventually brought to Almirante, a nearby port city, and sold. In the 80s, my host father was earning close to $2.50 per pound, but now he only earns about 50 cents. An incredible amount of work goes into each piece harvested; it´s unbelieveable to me that that´s all it´s worth.