Ecologic Chanchamayo aka: what I did for my first two weeks in Peru

This was July 6-20.  I'm a little late getting it posted. So sue me.

(Brace yourselves, this is kind of a long one)

So as you know, Shay and I are WWOOFing through Peru (Wikipedia article here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WWOOF ) working on organic farms.  Our first one in La Merced, Ecologic Harvest Chanchamayo, turned out to be office work rather than living and working on one of the actual farms.

View from the top floor of our office out over the river

I settled into learning how to do quality control on the incoming shipments.

When the dried, unshelled coffee comes in from the farms it's weighed in sacks on a giant scale, then we sample 400g, a little from each bag.  That sample gets de-shelled using a machine.

Then we go through the sample and find all the deformed, immature, broken, discolored (basically all the ugly) beans and remove them.  The exportable and discarded beans are weighed, and the chaff (cascarilla) is calculated and converted to a percentage.  These numbers show the growers what quality coffee they have and determines the price they can sell it for.

Good beans are on the paper, bad ones up in the little tray

I've found the shells are -17.3% of the total weight, 80% exportable is very good, usually 72-76% is what we see.

End result for the 'muestra' or sample.  Good beans in the bottom portion, bad ones at the top with the little paper saying all the percentages, where the beans came from, who the grower was, and how many sacks and kilos in the shipment.

We also check humidity of the sample which needs to be 12-13% to export.

The silver canister on the left (not the yogurt) is the humidity machine

If the beans are too damp they will get laid out on the parking strip on tarps to dry in the sun.  We've helped those out and re-bag them on occasion.

This was a big 10 basketball-court-size place we went to spread a lot of beans one time

Its hot heavy work as each bag is about 60 kilos (130lbs)

Office full of bean sacks waiting for the truck to take them to Lima to ship

The truck going to Lima

 Watching the guys load and unload the trucks, heaving the sacks up on their shoulders is kinda crazy.

Shay had the dubious honor of being given secretary work.

Answering phones for an unfamiliar business becomes much more difficult when its also in a foreign language.  I thought she did well, all things considered.  We teased with the other office workers that she was el peor secretaría del mundo que no habla la lengua, the worst secretary in the world who doesn't speak the language.

She kept the expenses record for the company, handled the cash drawer and payments, worked on some spreadsheet entry.  I did a bit of that too when we didn't have any bean shipments coming in for me to work on.

We stuck a flag up on the roof to get ready for independence day (July 28)

We thoroughly enjoyed all the people we worked with.  The office crew was fun, friendly, and extremely patient with our faltering Spanish. The days could get busy but they were always filled with laughter and good humor.  As were the couple evenings we went out for drinks with the office.

There was a group of three Dutch students that came for a couple days, Teun, Marcia, and Evelina.  They were doing research on the differences between the Peruvian and Brazilian organic coffee markets for thesis work, and were headed down to Brazil after researching farms in Peru.

Evelina and Teun are in the back, Orfa who I worked with most is on the right

We also had Nell (NY), Adrian (MI) and Orlando (Colombia) who were WWOOFing too.  Nell and Orlando were on vacation from Colombia where he goes to school and she teaches English, Adrian is backpacking around for a year.  We had some good times hanging out with them and plan to visit Nell and Orlando when we make it to Bogotá.

Having to leave new friends we meet along the way will definitely be one of the tough parts of traveling, but it will mean we have friends in more corners of the globe.

This was one night when we went swimming at a local hotel.  Zeus is on the left, Ricardo in the middle, Orfa, and her niece on the right.