VINALHAVEN — Coffee beans harvested by mountain villagers in Izotallio, El Salvador, arrived at a Deer Isle roastery in recent weeks and are slated for sale at a Vinalhaven flea market through the summer.
Proceeds will go to a scholarship fund to benefit students in Izotallio.
The global-connections initiative was facilitated—with a lot of hard work—by Tristan Jackson of Vinalhaven and Byron Thomas, a Vinalhaven School student just completing his junior year.
Jackson is a founder and operator of the ARCafé, a “social enterprise” Internet café and nonprofit using fresh products and serving as an “experiential education facility,” he explained.
The coffee project came about through Jackson’s natural tendency to create connections.
He became familiar with several mountain villages in El Salvador thanks to a friend, Dean Stevens, a Boston-based translator who regularly travels to the region with the goal of developing a coffee import initiative that would benefit poverty-stricken villagers.
Izotallio is a tiny enclave of 50-60 people, nearly a mile above sea level. They live in earth-brick huts and own little more than the dirt in which they grow approximately two tons of coffee beans per year. Jackson and Thomas visited Izotallio in January 2012, when Jackson mainly served as interpreter at a dental clinic set up by delegations of relief workers from St. Andrew’s Christian Church of Kansas, and Thomas lent a helping hand.
They returned in January 2013 to and met with coffee farmers.
“They grow coffee completely by hand,” Jackson said. “They’ve got no machinery that doesn’t take hand-power. They have a sheller device that they crank to process the coffee cherries. They take off the outer shell, remove the slimy inside, dry the beans in the sun, thresh by hand and winnow the beans in wind with baskets.”
Jackson and Thomas helped Stevens import nearly a ton of green coffee beans to Boston, where proceeds from their sale will go into a “coffee fund” kept by Stevens to support the villages in buying their beans at above-market prices and helping expand their market. Arranging the proper government certifications and shipping the beans took five months, Jackson said.
In the meantime, Thomas was moved by the plight of Izotallio’s youngsters, who receive free education through sixth grade but are on their own afterward. His idea was to set up a scholarship fund to help students get through high school, which costs $275 per year, or more than a month’s income in the villages there.
Thomas and his family put up enough money to buy 150 pounds of Stevens’ beans, and he and Jackson brought the load to the Deer Isle micro-roastery 44 North.
Thomas holds a student lobster license and fishes 80-100 traps. He plans to start a business to process lobster meat. He described El Salvador as “really amazing, especially in the rural parts. It’s very poor. They can pick coffee for about half the year. They get paid about $10 a day, and high school costs $400 a year, so they can’t pay for that. Electricity is new to the village [as of] five years ago.”
For the first summer, the coffee will be sold primarily at Vinalhaven’s Saturday flea market, but will also be available at ARCafé, online, and possibly through other outlets as the project moves ahead.
Jackson reckoned proceeds from 150 pounds should cover the cost of two years of education—one Izotallio student for two years, or two students for one year each.
Said Jackson, “We’re taking pictures the whole way along”—handpicking on the mountain, the donkey haul down, loading onto a Vinalhaven lobsterboat, roasting at Deer Isle.
“We’ll make a pictorial story and go back down with a bag of our roasted beans, with our label and the story of bringing it from there to here, and we’ll give them the money for the scholarship fund.”
Thomas said he expects to return with Jackson, probably in the coming winter, and he hopes to expand the coffee project to further benefit the mountain communities.