Harvest Season at La Hilda Estate

I would like to consider this article a follow up to my previous blog that introduced the cultural life of coffee pickers. These short stories from La Hilda school students show us how the coffee season is a cultural event in Costa Rica as well. These stories come from La Hilda School students in Spanish so I will try my best to keep intact its content and meaning in the translation
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In general, this time of the year in coffee-producing regions many activities start over. Each harvest season brings a sense of invigorating energy and hope, changing the ambiance and good mood in many people. Many activities surrounding this business reactivate at this time, such as seasonal labor, lodging, food services and so on. In addition, it is not unusual that youngsters cooperate in the harvest process. La Hilda school students are no exception; many of them are cooperating with their families for few hours a week for leisure purposes (in some cases) and for making some money in other cases. I would add that none of these outdoor activities are interrupting or affecting any scheduled classes.

The first story comes from Lorenzo:

“Hello Mr. Andres we have had two nice days more specifically on Thursday and Friday of the third week of November. All the school students went to pick coffee. One of the purposes besides having fun with an outdoor activity was to collect money for our end of the year trip. We were able to collect 223 “Cajuelas” (One Cajuela is equivalent to 44 Lb of ripe cherries) and the manager of the farm, Mr. Mariano paid us for this job. A snake surprised Ms. Veronica, our guiding teacher, during the picking, but fortunately it did not reach her and we did not have anything to worry about.

On the other hand, we have been learning a lot with our upgraded computer lab. Before our new teacher arrived we used to waste our time playing with computers. We are now improving our skills and knowledge on word processing and spreadsheets. We are also learning some good stuff such as doing simple operations like dividing, adding, multiplying and percentages among others things.

We have been working with a nice program called Micromundos that help us to improve our math skills as well; basic instructions move a turtle icon to draw a geometric form on the display.

Thanks to our brand new Internet access, we were able for the first time to learn how to send our work to the teacher via email. We are so happy with the Internet connection as well with the computer donation that your company did to our computer lab school.”

The second story comes from Drusila Romero who wrote “Mr. Andres we worked last week in the coffee field collecting coffee, for few hours, it was so fun, we could make some money to gather funds towards our end of the year trip- we plan to go to a funfair on December 12th.” As Lorenzo stated, they are enjoying the computer lab up grade facility moreover the guidance of the new teacher have improved her computer skills.

Another students stated “ Mr. Andres, we were a little disorganized and disobedient when we start picking coffee but our teacher was firm and comprehensive. We finally end up collecting between 7 to 8 cajuelas per student.

Juan Elias Fallas, a sixth grade student, wrote about some incident regarding a worker from Nicaragua within the farm. He is aware that workers that migrate from Nicaragua to Costa Rica during the harvest season carry with them benefits and challenges to local economy and inhabitants. On the other hand, he is also happy to learn how to manage a search engine and handle an email account.

Ivan Garcia told me how happy he is to work with a fixed schedule. For example, Mondays are dedicated to word and spreadsheet processor and Fridays to Micromudos programming. He said that the computer classes are well organized by topics. This class is helping them to learn one subject at the time. He is struggling to improve his typing skills but he believes with his teacher’s support he might able to overcome this obstacle.

This is all from La Hilda for now; we will bring more stories from our Farm Friendly Direct programs soon.