The Taste of Many Mountains

by Bruce Wydick

  Angela whimsically asked Ema if there were any cute boys at her school. Ema’s weight shifted on the ladder as she instantly turned to repel the question with a flying coffee cherry. But at this, the ladder began to sink in a patch of soft mud under one of its supports, and between the burden of the baby on her back and weakness brought on by laughter, Angela proved increasingly ineffective at steadying it.

  “Ema, bajate, se hunde la escalera!” Angela yelled.

  It was too late and it all fell toward the ground like a slowly wilting flower, resting on a neighboring coffee plant, with Ema tangled up in the branches, legs kicking at the clouds.

  Unfortunately, the entire series of events transpired at the moment of Fernando’s arrival.

  Fernando indeed appeared curious about what they might be doing to his coffee plants. With the patience of a father toward a beloved youngest child, he helped Ema extract herself from the coffee branches.

  He brought news that Victorina, an older woman living on the other side of Seis Cierros, had come to the house to see Angela. Apparently it was about some gifts that she had; probably for the baby, Angela thought. That was nice. It was good timing; her sack was getting full and the little peeps emanating from the cocoon signaled that Mariela needed changing anyway. She gave Ema her sack and walked through the coffee field toward the house, Mariela still bundled on her back. Perhaps her father might help with this one.

  “Alex, would you change the baby while I make a visit with Fernando?” called Angela into the house. “Alex?”

  Alex staggered slowly out of the back room. His mood seemed relatively upbeat, but he looked unshaven and disheveled from being up much of the night with Mariela, who at three weeks had not yet synchronized her waking and sleeping schedule to the day/night routine that is standard for older humans. He gently untied the red and yellow blankets that secured Mariela to Angela’s back and lifted his daughter above his head as his sleeves fell to his elbows, revealing traces of the old scars on his wrists. He nuzzled Mariela close to his unshaven face.

  “Oh no!” he laughed as he held her tiny face a few inches above his. “Daddy’s princess makes little dumplings? . . . Daddy makes stinky-poos all better . . . ,” he cooed as he began the changing ritual on a makeshift diaper table. “Angie, have you the diaper bag?”

  Angela followed Fernando and Victorina down the dirt road passing in front of the house.

  “Your daughter is muy bendicida, Angela,” remarked Fernando as they walked.

  “Blessed with a father who changes diapers?” she replied.

  “Far stronger than I in this way,” Fernando admitted sheepishly. “Es buen hombre, Angela.” A good man.

  “Thank you, Fernando.”

  They continued to walk down a path through some trees to a collection of ramshackle adobe dwellings. Outside chickens chased each other, and an old rusty mountain bike lay in the dirt on its side, and Victorina spoke.

  “I knew your mother well,” she explained. “But not as well as did my younger sister. Your mother was my sister’s best friend. My sister’s name was Mildred.”

  They walked inside one of the modest houses, and Victorina led Angela to a small wooden box. It looked old, probably made out of some kind of native wood, clearly hand-carved with inlays of Mayan jaguars, archers, stars, and new moons.

  “The box was a present from my father to Mildred when she was nine, but she kept it her whole life. She died the same day as your mother, Angela, the day the soldiers entered the village. But when they were friends, they would give each other gifts.” The three, who had each lost family that horrific day, sat down together on some humble chairs, and Angela and Fernando watched as Victorina opened the wooden box. She pulled out a light blue ribbon made of handwoven cloth.

  “Your mother gave this cinta to my sister for a birthday when they were little to wear in her hair.” Angela had seen many Guatemalan women with the cinta intertwined through their braids.

  “For you to have,” she said.

  Angela took the cinta in her hand. It was maybe forty years old now, yet still very elegant.

  “Thank you, Señora Victorina. I will treasure this.”

  She handed Angela several other items from the box, a few cards and letters from her mother to Mildred, and a metal comb with a bone handle that had a woman’s figure engraved in it.

  “They always wanted each other to be beautiful,” she said.

  The last item she drew out of the box was a small wooden crucifix on a copper chain. “From your mother to my sister, after her confirmation,” Victorina explained. “Now it is for your baby, perhaps to give at her baptism.”

  Angela sat down on one of the beds in the room and held the cross with the forlorn figure of Christ hanging on it, regarding it in the palm of her hand. The hand-carved figure on the cross looked different than similar figures she had seen before. The face had Mayan features.

  She stared at the Mayan-looking figure on the cross, and her mind began to trace the remarkable path of her life: her birth in San Pedro Necta, her rescue by Fernando and his family, adoption, growing up in California, insecurities about her birthmark and her identity that never seemed to abate, the seemingly impossible odds of discovering those who knew her as a child. The path since her return to Guatemala: accepted from the wait list at MIT the last week before school started, spending five years studying under Sofia, writing what some of the faculty at MIT called one of the finest dissertations that year.

  Then she reflected on the day when she and her friend Alex became more than best friends. This was followed by the two breakups, the two getting-back-togethers, and the decision that if they were going to fight like an old married couple, they might as well be one someday. It was that day during one of their return visits to Guatemala, when they hiked together to the peak of the Santa Maria, that he told her he loved her and could not live without her, getting down on one knee and asking her to marry him. Then came the difficult periods when he was away with the Bank, working in a faraway country as she toiled at her consulting job in DC, Alex then leaving the Bank to enroll in seminary, then the founding of the nonprofit together.

  Despite the path taken by Alex, inwardly she never regarded herself as a deeply spiritual person; it was only at this moment that she began to feel that something had guided her life, or at least had accompanied her, through its valleys and peaks all to reach this very day, and what lay beyond. Angela began to caress the delicate figure in her hand.

  Some of the valleys she did not understand. She did not understand the death of Lourdes and her baby, although she couldn’t help but see how her own life had been dramatically altered because of it. And though her understanding of poverty had grown through her studies, she did not understand why so many of her relatives had to live without knowing anything other than being poor. Then she thought of her mother, and she began to see her mother’s death in the Mayan-looking figure on the cross. How ironic, she thought, that her mother’s death had given Angela all of the advantages that never would have been hers had it not been for a singularly gross act of brutality.

  Angela put the items in the pocket of her traje, except for the crucifix, which she placed around her neck, tucking the figure under her huipil. She thanked and hugged Victorina, and she and Fernando walked back to the house, where Juana and Ema greeted them. Ema smiled and put her finger to her lips, motioning to the porch where Alex lay asleep out front in a chair, dozing peacefully with his hat over his face and the baby Mariela asleep on his chest.

  POSTSCRIPT

  THE RESULTS OF THE STUDY BY MY COLLEAGUES FROM THE University of California on the impact of fair trade coffee, now pending publication in the Review of Economics and Statistics, were surprising to many academics, and perhaps even more surprising to the fair trade coffee industry. Yet as researchers on the project presented the findings in seminars at research institutions, other economists began to see the flaw in the design of the fair trade certification system, and it became clear
how it was impossible for the system to yield long-term price benefits to growers.

  One of the researchers mentioned that in a seminar at the RAND Corporation, after researchers in the audience understood the fair trade certification process, they predicted the ensuing zero-impact result even before seeing the data. This was because the fair trade coffee mechanism, as it has been practiced to date, attempts to violate one of the most fundamental laws of economics: where surplus profit can be obtained, it will be sought after, driving the benefits out of the system.

  The flaws in the fair trade coffee system should not discourage us from more effective efforts to help the poor in developing countries. A recent poll I undertook, among top development economists specializing in the study of program impacts, listed the provision of fresh water as yielding the largest benefit per dollar among the antipoverty programs to which ordinary people frequently contribute. (Drinking fair trade coffee finished second to last, ahead only of handing out free laptops to children in poor countries.) Giving money to organizations that work in preventative health, especially among children, is highly effective: deworming, antimalaria campaigns, vaccinations, nutrition programs for expectant mothers, and so forth. My own research on international child sponsorship indicates that sponsoring a child, particularly girls, and particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, has tremendous impacts on the future education, vocation, and adult income of beneficiaries. While microfinance has shown somewhat disappointing impacts in randomized controlled trials, recent efforts to channel cash grants directly to the poor have shown remarkable impacts in many parts of the world. Researchers find that the vast majority of these funds are not wasted, but rather spent on food, clothing, schooling, and building up household assets like animal herds and small business capital.

  While the economics and the research study discussed in this book are real, the characters in this book are mainly fictitious with the exception of two. Jimmy, the owner of the Blue Danube Coffee House in San Francisco, is a real person, a really wonderful person, and we thank him for allowing us to carry out behavioral experiments on his coffee customers. Lourdes Asusana Guitz Alva was a wonderful young friend of our family living in a Quiché village in western Guatemala, whom my wife and I had the pleasure of sponsoring through Mayan Partners as she attended secondary school, and who inspired her character in this book. In November 2009 Lourdes died unexpectedly of a pregnancy-related brain hemorrhage at the age of twenty-one, and we dedicate this book to her memory.

  READING GROUP GUIDE

  1. Based on your own experience and views on poverty and globalization issues, which character in the novel can you identify with most closely?

  2. At times do you feel guilty about living in a rich country when so many in the world live in poverty?

  3. If you have traveled to a developing country, how did the contrast between your lifestyle in your home country and what you experienced there make you feel? Can you relate to Angela’s feelings when returning to her country of birth for the first time?

  4. Do you believe globalization is generally a good thing for the poor in developing countries, or do you believe it hurts them? Why?

  5. What is the responsibility of people in wealthy countries to those living in poverty in developing countries? What forms the base of your values that dictates your relationship toward the poor? Spiritual? Secular?

  6. Consider Alex’s debate with Genevieve about sweatshops. What do you believe about multinational investment in developing countries? What is our best ethical response to it as consumers?

  7. Do you drink fair trade coffee? What might be a better way to help coffee growers in poor countries than the traditional fair trade mechanism?

  8. Can you think of other ways people give to the poor overseas that may make them feel good about themselves but may not be very effective in helping the poor?

  9. What is one idea you have to help a poor family or individual in a developing country? How do you know it would genuinely help them as opposed to merely making you feel less guilty about living in a wealthy country?

  10. Moving forward, would you be willing to commit to taking one concrete step of action that would support the plight of the poor to live with economic security and dignity?

  LIST OF REFERENCNCES BY CHAPTER

  THE TEN LARGEST COFFEE-CONSUMING NATIONS ON A PER capita basis in order are Norway, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Belgium, and France. The United States ranks twelfth. (Data is from the Global Market Information Database, published by Euromonitor.) The ten largest coffee-producing nations in order are Brazil, Vietnam, Colombia, Indonesia, Mexico, India, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Honduras, and Peru. (Data is from the Food and Agricultural Organization.) Figures on per capita income, infant mortality, and education come from the World Bank and the Millennium Development Goals database.

  CHAPTER 5

  The references to Sofia’s dialogue on economic growth are from Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson (2001), “The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Review,” American Economic Review 91 (5)5: 1360–1401; and Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson (2006), Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (New York: Cambridge University Press).

  CHAPTERS 8–10

  The data from the study of the fair trade coffee value chain come from Rosangela Bando and Gonzalo de los Rios (2007), “The Coffee Value Chain in Guatemala: A Case Study of Fair Trade,” and Rosangela Bando and Elizabeth Sadoulet (2012), “Understanding the Coffee Value Chain in Guatemala: A Case Study,” USAID-BASIS Brief (March).

  CHAPTER 11

  Many of the references to the early history of coffee are from Regina Wagner (2001), La Historia del Café de Guatemala (Bogota, Colombia: Benjamin Villegas y Asociados); Nina Lutinger and Gregory Dicum (2006), The Coffee Book (New York: New Press); Inernational Coffee Organization, “The Story of Coffee” (www.ico.org/coffee_story); and Gordon Wrigley (1988), Coffee (New York: Wiley).

  CHAPTER 13

  The story of Guatemalan immigration is taken from an experience I had during fieldwork, where most of the men from the households I needed to interview had left and were working as busboys in Houston. It was claimed in the (relatively small) village that five hundred men were currently living there, many of them in the same apartment complex. An excellent international economics text with outstanding data on immigration and foreign investments is Appleyard, Field, and Cobb (2010), International Economics, 7th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill/Irwin).

  CHAPTER 15

  References used in creating the backdrop for Guatemalan coffee history are principally taken from David McCreery (1994), Rural Guatemala (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), and William Roseberry, Lowell Gudmundson, and Mario Samper Kutschbach, eds. (1995), Coffee, Society and Power in Latin America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). Also see Steward Lee Allen (1999), The Devil’s Cup: A History of the World according to Coffee (Toronto: Ballantine).

  CHAPTER 17

  Amy L. Sherman (1997), The Soul of Development: Biblical Christianity and Economic Transformation in Guatemala (New York: Oxford University Press), is an excellent resource on the emergence of evangelical Christianity in Latin America generally and Guatemala specifically. See also David Stoll (1990), Is Latin American Turning Protestant? The Politics of Evangelical Growth (Berkeley: University of California Press).

  The seminal work on World Systems Theory is Immanuel Wallerstein (1976), The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press). See also Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto (1976), Dependency and Development in Latin América (Berkeley: University of California Press).

  For academic papers that have indicated economic openness to be linked to growth, see Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Warner (1995), “Economic Reform and the Process of Global Integration,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, no. 1: 1–118, and Romain Wacziarg and Kare
n Horn Welch (2008), “Trade Liberalization and Growth: New Evidence,” World Bank Economic Review 22 (2): 187–231.

  An excellent review article that examines the impact of globalization on inequality is David Richardson (1995), “Income Inequality and Trade: How to Think, What to Conclude,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 3:33–55. See also Ann Harrison and Gordon Hansen (1995), “Trade, Technology, and Wage Inequality,” National Bureau of Economic Research, working paper no. W5110.

  A great article on the impact of Protestant missions on the development of democracy in poor countries is Robert Woodbury, “The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy,” American Political Science Review 106 (2): 244–74.

  The seminal article on the economics of identity is George Akerlof and Rachel Kranton (2000), “Economics and Identity,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 115 (1): 715–53, and the same authors give a discussion of identity and poverty traps in Akerlof and Kranton (2005), “Social Divisions within Schools,” in The Social Economics of Poverty, ed. Christopher Barrett (New York: Routledge).

  CHAPTER 18

  Data from Bando and de los Rios (2007). The historical references to US–Latin American coffee relations and the International Coffee Agreement draw from Mark Pendergrast (1999), Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World (New York: Basic Books), and Nina Lutinger and Gregory Dicum (2006), The Coffee Book (New York: New Press). The information about fair trade coffee is taken from the online resources of Global Exchange, www.globalexchange.org. Much of the background on the origin and structure of the fair trade coffee industry comes from Antony Wild (2004), Black Gold: A Dark History of Coffee (London: Harper Perennial).

  CHAPTER 19

  The new innovations in the study of causal effects have revolutionized development economics. Excellent references for this material are Esther Duflo, Rachel Glennerster, and Michael Kremer (2007), “The Use of Randomization in Development Economics: A Toolkit,” in The Handbook of Development Economics, ed. Dani Rodrik and Mark Rosenzweig; and Shahidur R. Khandker et al. (2010), Handbook on Impact Evaluation (Washington, DC: World Bank and Oxford University Press).