Mercy in the Madness

When exploring Northern Virginia on a long weekend recently, we visited a small coffee shop in old town Manassas where we enjoyed cappuccinos and hot chocolate and a few baked goods. As we settled in, my husband noticed a basket of Colombian coffee sacks for sale. Rafael is from Mexico, not Colombia, but he recognized those 70kg burlap sacks the moment he saw them.

When he was in grade school, Rafael asked the neighborhood baker if he could work for him for bread, and the baker accepted this proposal. In exchange for bread, he delivered baked goods around the neighborhood or cleaned the greasy trays. He also made an occasional arrangement with a man who sold ice cream, to push his heavy cart from place to place in order to earn a cold treat. It wasn’t long before he was earning pocket change whenever he could. This he saved for weeks until one day he was able to buy a pound of deli ham.

He had never had processed lunch meat before, but he was entranced by its salty smell and the tender, juicy pink look of it. He bought a package of it and an orange Fanta to wash it down. Being the youngest, he had no desire to share with the older siblings who sometimes made him miserable, and who weren’t the ones breaking a sweat to earn this luscious meal. He solved the problem by running with his treasure to a certain tree where he could climb high unnoticed and have some privacy. There he ate the entire package of ham and drank the soda. When he remembers it, his eyes glaze over with the beauty of it. He has never looked back.

After these early tastes of the benefits of hard work, Rafael was hooked. He had never done well at school. Home was chaotic and homework was left undone. Classes felt long, and he couldn’t sit still. He couldn’t muster the concentration to keep his mind on his lessons. His body longed for the soccer field like a caught fish gasps for air. And he wanted money. He wanted to buy food to fill his belly and shoes to protect his feet. He was hungry to have more.

As a young teenager, he quit school and moved to a camp at a coffee production company not too long a journey from home. He was the youngest person on the team. Everyone knew his father, who had gone far in the coffee industry and was known for being able to judge the best coffee beans by smell. Everyone said Rafael resembled this wild man who had bit the tail of a bull and lost all his natural front teeth as a consequence.

Not yet old enough to drive, he started working long shifts, sun up to sun down. He went from one coffee harvest to the next; most of the work entailed carrying huge, heavy sacks of coffee (just like the one he discovered in the shop) to load on a truck. The men used large, heavy hooks to lift the packages onto their backs. Each man was paid 20 pesos to move one ton of coffee from the factory to the trucks. The trucks numbered in the four to five thousand.

Rafael, the youngest and smallest, staggered at first under their weight, which was about 150 pounds. But he would not be discouraged – his body was strong, invincible. He would prove himself and learn to hoist the package with a grunt, run the route (fast!) to the truck, and come back for another, over and over and over, while the daylight lasted – up to 14 hours a day – until the enormous harvest was moved. As he became accustomed to the work, he felt his energy could never run out. He was sure that he could do anything.

Around 5, the men added grain alcohol to the coolers of tang they shared. As their energy began to flag after the hours of heavy labor, they gulped down huge swigs of it in hopes of giving themselves the kick they needed to keep moving. More than once, Rafael saw men grow clumsy and careless, falling from the scaffolding set up in the factories where the sacks of coffee were stacked several stories high, knocking down the sacks to be crushed to death under their weight. Still, he carried within him the certainty that he would not share such a fate, that he would someday escape this labor. And he did. But that’s a story for another day…