With broken fingernails:

With broken fingernails and bruised, scraped skin from rubbing against branches and sharp sticks; coffee pickers against all odds, managed to fill up beautiful baskets call “canastos" woven out of a type of reed that used to grow wild in the woods, with the precious, coveted red bean. The red coffee beans were later poured into large burlap sacks. The canastos were worn around peoples' waists and secured with thick belts of leather or rubber in order to support the weight of the coffee. While adult-sized canastos were made large enough to gather up one or two “ cajuelas”, the equivalent of 32 pounds of coffee, kids baskets were made in "cuartillos" with a capacity to collect about 3 kilos, smaller and a bit more manageable.

I remember how heavy those baskets were. They were weighty and cumbersome. It was hard to walk straight even to the nearest coffee tree, only about one or two meters apart, carrying all that weight around the waist. Children had to make a bigger effort to reach the coffee branches heavy with the beans. Sometimes the belt supporting the baskets became undone and the beans spilled all over the ground covered with a thick layer of dead leaves, twigs and clumps of dirt or went rolling in all directions. When coffee has to be picked from the ground, it is never easy separating the beans from decaying leaves and dirt lumps. This type of “accident” is always a big setback. Coffee picking is a very competitive activity. The faster a worker picks the ripe beans from the densely planted rows of coffee trees; the more profits are obtained at the end of the day.

At lunchtime, workers took a break to eat their cold lunches in tin bowls wrapped in cloth napkins. Hot beverages, such as coffee and agua dulce, were put into ordinary glass bottles, which were cold by the time lunchtime arrived - at noon when the sun was to be hitting the hardest.

No nap after lunch:

No worker could ever afford the luxury of a nap after lunch was over. It was time to get up and go back to the picking. Despite all of that, I have happy memories of those cold lunches of rice and beans and tortillas, sitting on the damp earth, taking a break from the physical, exhausting work.

On late afternoon, before it got dark, our hands, arms and faces stained and filled with the sticky juice of the ripe beans, my family and all of the others there, took our canastos and burlap sacks filled to the rim with the shiny red beans to the weighing station, a central place at the plantation where a couple of large trucks served both to collect the grain from the laborers and as platforms from where the men in charge of the payroll paid the workers their daily earnings. At the weight station, the coffee was weighed by "cuartillos", "cajuelas" or "fanegas", which are the terms used in the coffee industry in Costa Rica to refer to the amount of coffee gathered up by the worker.

The form of pay used to be handled with plastic tokens like the ones used at casinos nowadays. Those coffee tokens were kept, then exchanged for cash on payday at the end of the week. Hundreds of families like mine exchanged their token and walked out of the fields with their very hard-earned money, just before going home to rest for the weekend..

Writer's Profile:

Ana, who now lives permanently in Costa Rica with her husband Steve Brown, lived for almost 20 years in the United States. Feeling "homesick" for Costa Rica during all of those years, she put down on paper some of the things she remembered from her childhood as a way to keep alive her memories.

For several years she taught mentally handicapped children, and was active in several community organizations in her hometown in Illinois, including the Special Olympics. On her spare time, she went out for long walks or wrote poetry and articles of local interest. Many of her stories were published in the town newspaper, The Edwardsville Intelligencer. Her poetry appeared in "Voices from the Edge, a writer's club publication, and in many newsletters.

© El Residente ARCR Administración S.A. San José, Costa Rica N.B. Like all information on the internet, this article may currently be incorrect or out of date.