Part 2: Navigating the coffee slopes

Part 2 of the diary of Maylin Heard, a member of a coffee brigade to Nicaragua 1986 organised by the UK Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign (NSC)

22 November 1986: Herbie helps me navigate the slopes and teaches me Spanish, we witness the Sandinista health crusade in action; our brigade becomes national news

To update you…I thought picking was difficult on Wednesday when we all kept getting lost, but it turned out to be something of a beginner’s trial run! On Thursday, when we set off it was raining but it cleared by the time we got to where we were picking.

Because we made such a bodge of it the day before, we were paired off each with our own Nicaraguan picker, who all seemed to be young boys or women from 20 to 76. Mine was an impish young man, who could well have been any age up to around 12. His name was Herbie, and I was supposed to follow him and pick where he told me. Sounds reasonable enough. Except he was around three foot tall, barefoot and extremely agile.

Well, Herbie crouched down and shot through the tunnel of undergrowth about a foot across and expected me to follow him. The bushes were absolutely saturated and after 30 seconds of crawling my way through, so was I. Then, it started to rain! By the time we got to the bottom (by a complicated, circuitous route), we were all muddy and saturated. Of course, the next thing we had to do was to climb back up the mud slides. It went on like this for most of the day.

There was a hairy moment when I plain refused to follow the path Herbie wanted me to take as my feet were sliding down over a sheer drop. Every time we got to the top we were met by a different fantastic view. I haven’t been taking many photos, they wouldn’t do the view justice anyway, what is important is to fix the view in my memory.

I’m writing this in the sun on the porch while Eileen is brewing up some water so we can have tea, and the young daughters of one of the campesinas are playing a game leaping from a wall and swinging around a pole. We are used to seeing the boys playing but the girls are much shyer. The water has just boiled, and I am having rosehip tea with Matagalpa honey…beats the hell out of rehydration solution.

Anyway, despite the fact that it must have been very frustrating, Herbie stuck with me and taught me a few words of Spanish, which I promptly forgot apart from the one for spider, which is embedded in my memory. I also learnt the words for butterfly, ant, and frog (the frog was the size of a kitten). He also gave me presents; we stopped under an orange tree and he spent a patient five minutes throwing a stick till he had two oranges to give me: they were delicious. He also gave me something like a large rosehip which one of the campesina/s said was a banana pod. He split it open, and it looked like a mass of maggots (which it wasn’t) but I didn’t fancy tasting it.

When we got back, and we were all relaxing, three women turned up from a health clinic to see all the children on the UPE. They come once a week, weigh the children and give them a general check. This time some of them had vaccinations: polio drops in the mouth and injections in the bum. Of course, all this happened in the yard and was one of the public events of the week. We interviewed the senior woman and she invited us to visit her at the health centre. She introduced us to a health brigadista who has volunteered to do this as an extra responsibility. He is trained in basic diagnosis and administering vaccines. It was all quite an event: the health crusade in action.

Members of our brigade gave their cameras to the children, showed them how they worked and let them take photos.

We’ve become national news! Our arrival was announced on Radio Sandino as the first international brigade to arrive for this harvest. What with that, and our interview with Nuevo Diario, we are feeling quite important.

Quite early in the evening, the runs started and stomach cramps, by the morning half the brigade was too ill to work, symptoms varied, some were vomiting, some not. I had a headache, which was almost certainly due to dehydration as I had lost so much fluid. Drinking lots was hard because we were using puritabs in the water and they tasted revolting. Anyway, we had petrol for the stoves, and we had tea. Most of us in the women’s room spent a lot of time sleeping.

I wasn’t too bad during the night although weak and still with cramps. The main worry was the confirmation that the extremely noisy animals in the roof were rats! It also rained heavily, and the water started coming out of the taps completely opaque like liquid mud.

In the morning although I was weak, I decided to go to work after eating bread and honey rather than beans and rice. The picking was all on extremely steep slopes but there were many more red berries …the downside was that our sacks were heavier!

The convalescents in the party then rested and went to have their pick weighed. We met up with Nelson and Herbie and a group of Nicaraguan women pickers. Hal conducted a sort of name game where he told them our names in Spanish, which they seemed to think was hysterical and we learnt their names. It was Hal’s first day picking as he and a few other men had been doing some wiring on the school…he came in for a lot of ribbing about his poor picking and how easy the picking had been compared to the previous day.