A fond look back

Having visited El Salvador, even if only for a week, a cup of coffee will never taste the same.

Equal Exchange, an importer from outside Boston that helped to originate the fair trade coffee movement in the U.S., sponsored the interfaith delegation that included six of us from Goshen College, four Presbyterians from Nebraska and West Virginia, and a Methodist minister, also from Nebraska. Our guides came from CRISPAZ, Christians for Peace in El Salvador.

As you would expect, we drank a lot of coffee: for breakfast, for lunch, for afternoon pick-me-ups. (A member of the Goshen group confessed on the way down that he did not actually drink coffee, but at that hour it was too late to turn around.)

Back in Goshen, one avid coffee drinker (milk, no sugar) takes a sip and remembers:

• Jose Antonio, who walks an impossibly steep dirt road, an hour each way, to harvest coffee at the Las Colinas cooperative, and returns home by foot for a meal of corn tortillas and beans.
• Carmencita, who graciously prepared coffee and all of the meals at the guest house where we stayed in San Salvador and who, on the last night, told stories of her “muy duro” work on a coffee plantation in years past.
• Archbishop Oscar Romero, a champion of the poor and dispossessed, who was assassinated in 1980 and who now is the people’s saint, seemingly present everywhere in image and in spirit.