Coffee Board

the first week back in the field after my week of rest actually went pretty well. we stayed at the coffee board of india which is a government agency that is part of the cafnet project. there is a research substation that has guest houses where the employees stay, labs, coffee farms, a temple, and even a nursery school. the women stayed in the main guest house and the guys stayed in a guest house down the road. the women definitely got the better end of the deal on that one. the rooms have beds and there is running water and even hot water! also, there is a cook who makes really good food. indian food 3 times a day though is a little much for me – especially spicy food with chilis at 6:15 in the morning…the cook though takes out a portion of the meal and only adds about 3 chilis for me and then adds probably 20 more for the rest of the meal. breakfast is usually a coconut chutney with red chili and dosas or idly. dosas are kind of like sour dough pan cakes and idly (which i’m probably spelling wrong) are disk shaped balls of rice basically. i eat them with honey and ghee (which is clarified butter) both of which are served in tiny portions though. or else she’ll make a “rice item” as they say which means rice with vegetables and curry. it is a little heavy for me for breakfast. my favorite breakfast that she makes is a potato curry with poori which is kind of like a quickly fried rice tortilla.

i had some interesting conversations with the coffee farmers at the sites where we worked this week. one site was native trees and coffee, next to a native forest and we caught by far the most number of animals to date, as well as wild boars and civet cat in the camera trap. the farmer’s wife is a journalist and asked my opinion about a story she is writing. there is to be a trash cleanup in their village where the community members will walk and collect all the trash and debris along the roads. she wanted to know if it was better that they burn or bury the trash. this is something that i actually studied for my masters so i was able to comment intelligently on it, but there is no answer…neither of them are very good options. if you burn it, you will be burning plastics and releasing toxins into the air – unless you have some sort of air filter or scrubber which even then does not remove all the pollutants. if you bury it, there are a lot of things that are not biodegradable (including plastics) and as the rainwater filters through the soil through the garbage, it picks up pollutants from the trash (the liquid is called leachate) and it seeps into the groundwater and drinking water. it was an interesting conversation that basically concluded with how do we start the process to ban plastics.

i also spoke with the farmer’s wife at the second site about the socioeconomic issues with the government and laborers. the farmers that i am working with are wealthy and the laborers are like slaves almost. the wife was telling me how it used to be that there was a bondage between the “master” and laborer. the master provided the food and clothing and housing and took care of their laborers, but now the government has stepped in and severed that bond, they provided housing and gave them rice and now the men spend all their salaries on alcohol and leave the women and children to fend for themselves. they no longer live on the same property and there is lawlessness in the villages where the laborers live. it was an interesting conversation. it may be true that the laborers are drinking away their money – i don’t know, but they are their own people too. the woman was making it sound like they were children or property. i think using the word "master" made me feel weird.

one of the rats that got trapped tried to escape through the back and died, so it was half out-half in the trap when we got there in the morning. it had to be injected with formaldehyde and then preserved in a jar the formaldehyde solution ...and we had to cut off its ear as a tissue sample and put in alcohol. me, i had to do this. luckily, asha stepped up to the plate and did the medical procedures and just mixed the solutions. the rat was floating though in the jar and we couldn’t get it to go down and then gecko squeaked and we both looked at the jar and thought the rat had come back to life. we couldn’t stop laughing after that. hopefully that will be the last dead animal we have to deal with.

only one of the women was working for the most part this week, so there were no fights which was nice. there were only 4 of us staying at the guest house so we went to see some of the sites in the area after work a couple of nights. we went to abbi falls (a water fall), a hindu temple that had really nice paintings of some of the hindu gods, and rajaseat which is where one of the kings used to sit to watch the sunsets. at rajaseat there was a fountain light and music show where music was blared through speakers and the water in the fountain made to dance to the music with lights shining underneath. it was kind of like a disney world or six flags show. there were tons of tourists at each of these places, but i was the only white person and felt like i was part of the tourist attraction as people pointed and stared. i still haven’t gotten used to that. it was a good week though and gave me a chance to be with some of the field team not in the work environment. i learned that i am the first white female that they have worked with and when i first arrived they thought that i looked pretty, but had a skin disease (which i had to explain was actually freckles)…