Lauwra in the DR: To the Loma!

Over the last two months, some of my neighbors and a lot of literacy students (mostly male) have disappeared. I’m told that they are en la loma, “in the mountain.” It’s coffee picking season, and those who have land or just work it for somebody else move up into the mountains for months at a time. Coffee grows up where it’s a little cooler, which could be anywhere from an hour to three hours away from Tabara (meaning an hour or two on a motorcycle, followed by a long, vertical hike… or going a different route on a donkey.) So instead of an impossible daily commute, whole families just stay up there for a while, living in clearings in the middle of their coffee trees.

My neighbors have been talking about taking me up to see their coffee ever since I arrived in Tabara six months ago. Last week we finally got ourselves together and caravanned up to the mountain on motos (and then on foot), where I found a bunch of my missing friends! They had already finished picking for the day, and were now sitting around, playing cards, waiting for lunch to cook and taking turns spinning the crank on the machine they use to shell the coffee beans. After more than a month without leaving the mountain, fifteen people sharing two rooms in a shack house with bedrolls and hammocks, they seemed pretty settled in. My arrival was a big surprise!