Agros Blog

Manuel jumped into the bed of our pick-up truck, an ear to ear grin on his face as he waved, shouting to his fellow Tzotzil villagers, “I’m off to the Teaching Fields to give our new gringo family gifts of gratitude for this momentous day they brought us!”

Alfonso, an Agros Agronomist, said that Manuel had a surprise for us. A few minutes later he pulled over and both hopped out of the truck, crossed the road bending beneath the black mesh canopied Rose training field, with the glint of drawn knife blades shinning as they began their cutting search. Sensing what was up, I searched for my camera and found it in the knick of time, snapping a photo of grace personified in Manuel’s face.

I did this just before he began to hand each of us a long stem, rain dappled, red rose, saying “Chahall” (which means “thank-you” in his native Tzotzil), and then waving goodbye as he turned for the walk back up to the Agros village of Nueva Palestina, in the hilly region of Southwestern Chiapas, México.

Only a few hours before this tender moment, the seven of us were strangers –wrapped in a cultural bouquet of sights, sounds and smells. Together we were witnessing the renewal of hope of thirty-two families as we signed a covenant of mutual commitment between Nueva Palestina, Apple Physical Therapy (a 260 employee company providing financial and service team support to Agros International), and Agros México, unfolding before us like Manuel’s fragrant roses.

Seizing upon the ceremony as a teachable moment, Sergio Sanchez, Country Director of Agros Mexico, involved all as they streamed forth to sign the symbolic banner of brotherhood. While some could indeed sign, others could only make a thumbprint, followed by one of the village leaders or Sergio, who would write the person’s name above the ink mark.

Once the formalities were finished, the families invited us to a feast of fried free-range chicken, rice, black beans and cups of Horchata; dipped from a new 30 gallon plastic garbage can full enough for all present to have a subsequent celebration drink.

At this moment, while the village waited their turn, a “thorn prick” pained us all –we were to eat alone, while the eyes of children and women watched waiting until we were finished. Here our gentle mentor Sergio emerged again; reminding us that we were honored guests and this was their custom. He said, “Live into their moment for in doing so you honor them.”

Solidarity with the poor means risking life-altering encounters and advocacy. When we are willing to venture forth, trusting tutors like Sergio and a humble villager like Manuel to open our eyes and hearts we walk in the “teaching fields” together, being led among both the roses and thorns.

If you’d like to learn more about entering into teachable moments with us, email me at davidc@agros.org!

Little entrepreneurs changing the world

A couple weeks ago, 11 year old Rachel Lingenbrink and her mother Terri arrived at our offices in Seattle’s U-District laden with a shoe-box of luscious vine ripened tomatoes, sweet golden yellow tear-drops, and red cherry-toms. Rachel also carried with her a Tupperware container filled with cash ready to give it all as her part in supporting a Guatemalan village called Xeucalvitz , which in the Ixil language means “Half-way up the Mountain”. Rachel has been three times to this remote Agros village of nearly 100 families, endearing herself to the kids there, broadening her worldview, and seeing the plight of the rural poor through tender eyes as only one so young can.

This summer, as part of her family’s growing commitment to serve the poor, she and her mother spent two weeks in the beautiful Spanish colonial city of Antigua, Guatemala, immersed in an intensive Spanish language program. Meanwhile, her older sister Sarah (13) was immersed in an ecological program in Costa Rica. Father/husband Steve kept the home-fires going in his law-practice, knowing that what he’d gotten his family into by venturing forth four years prior on that first trip to Xeucalvitz was bearing fruit in ways he’d hoped, beaming on his way into the office, eager to check the latest e-mails from down South!

While in Antigua, Rachel’s enterprising mind kicked into gear, fueled by Terri’s encouragement, to purchase colorful woven bracelets called “pulseras”. The child vendors of Antigua often peddle them along the cobbled streets of the city. Rachel thought she could do the same back home along the paved promenade of her neighborhood. Her idea was to open a lemonade stand with her sister and sell pulseras for the poor, telling would be buyers of their heart for helping those less fortunate in a high mountain village far away.

After biting into a sweet golden yellow tear-drop tomato, I led Rachel and her mother Terri into the accounting office carrying the purple-topped Tupperware treasure chest she’d handed me, and introduced her to Claudia Alvarenga-Beech, asking if she could give Sarah a full-accounting and receipt. As the pennies, quarters and bills spilled onto Claudia’s desk, her calculator began to sing as she tabulated the total…a whopping $89.26!! A minute later the printer hummed, producing the receipted accomplishment, handed over to a grinning Rachel.

This type of sacrificial and creative giving exemplifies a heart-felt response, which all of us long to nurture and release when we pause long enough to think about it. So be it a lemonade stand or some other expression, may you and I be encouraged to step outside the “box of comfort” we tend to insulate our lives with, and listen for what we might do too.

Thank you Sarah and Rachel, may your gift and the spirit behind it, touch hearts that read this to “go and do likewise”

“If I were to ask you what the single largest commodity in the world is, you’d probably reply immediately: “oil”. But if I were to ask you what the second largest commodity in the world is, would you know the answer?

More money changes hands in the buying and selling of coffee than any other global product - save for oil. For those of us coffee lovers in the United States, we make up the largest consumers; drinking one-fifth of the world’s supply. However few of us realize that the farmers who actually produce the coffee live and work in conditions that have been described as “sweatshops in the fields”. Most rural coffee farmers around the world are caught in cycles of poverty and debt due to receiving prices that are far less than actual production costs.

In response to this crisis, coffee producers, buyers, traders, etc.. have established “Fair Trade” standards that are meant to insure that coffee is purchased under equal and fair conditions. To be certified as a Fair Trade coffee importer you must meet strict criteria; paying coffee farmers at specific prices per pound, offering sufficient credit to farmers, and providing agricultural assistance where needed. Fair Trade for farmers means better health care, education, community development, and living wages for their labor. In fact, the “Fair Trade” designation and standards are used for more than just coffee…here is just one other example: Fair Trade Sports.

For more than a year now, Agros has benefited from a key partnership with Camano Island Coffee Roasters (CICR). CICR is a certified organic, shade-grown, and fairly traded coffee company. In fact, they even purchase and roast coffee from Agros villages! They also offer a nationwide coffee club, where subscribers receive two-and-a-half pounds of Fairly Traded (and delicious) coffee delivered direct to their home. The benefit to Agros is that subscribers can designate that $1 of the subscription prices goes direct to Agros. It’s a win-win for all: the farmer, Camano Island Coffee Roasters, Agros villagers, and you.

The folks at CICR are great people, their coffee is excellent (full disclosure: I am a CICR coffee-loving subscriber), and their commitment to the Fair Trade movement helps assure that coffee farmers reap the true rewards of their work.

Click here for more information, and go to Camano Island Coffee Roasters for their external website.

Agros International is featured in this article at Modern Woodworking. The focus is on the “Journey With A Village” partnership between Pacific Crest Cabinets and the Agros Village “La Esperanza” in El Salvador. Here is an excerpt:

“I’ve been in third world countries before, but when you add appalling living conditions with desperation and lack of hope, it’s a very, very discouraging outlook. I remember the women and children wouldn’t look us in the eye, and the men all had a downtrodden attitude. There was one public bathroom and one water faucet for more than a thousand people. I saw two little boys playing in the dirt pretending sticks were cars and making car noises. I had a flashback to my own childhood when I would go outside and play with my toy cars in the dirt and make the same noises. But what was different was that I had the potential of realizing the dream. I started wondering about these little boys and how old will they be when their dreams get crushed — when they realize they’ll never have that car or that truck and they’ll never have anything – that they are poor and they will always be poor and basically there’s no hope in life. To be honest my heart was broken.
“The next day we visited two fairly new AGROS villages. The people were living in their little tin houses in the remote parts of El Salvador, and frankly, they still had nothing materially, but they had everything that you need to be happy in life because of hope. Each of these farmers was proud to share his story and show us his field of beans and corn all planted by hand. I remember one woman who was so exuberant about the chance that the village children would now have an opportunity to live a dream that she could never realize herself. It was very moving. This woman said she used to go to sleep and dream about opportunities or ways to make things better for her family, but now she could dream with her eyes open. It was a moving experience.”

Read the entire article here…

The following is from a letter written by a 23yr old college student who recently went on a service team trip to the village of Nuevo Renacer, El Salvador.

“I pray that this e-mail finds you well and at home relaxing. If you are at work and struggling to get back into the swing of the daily grind like myself, I feel your pain. I have learned, however, that my previous definition of hard work was severely inadequate. This El Salvador trip has been a powerful, life-altering experience for me, and it has led me to realize how many blessings I take for granted. Being able to make a living off of my skills in corporate finance, which adds pretty much nothing to the wellbeing of society, seems ridiculous to me now. If you’re in education, health care, or ministry, the transition may be less of a shock, since you’re continuing to serve those in need.

The images that the Lord has shown me on this trip have sparked a fire of thankfulness in my heart. Lance Armstrong’s statement of appreciation after his bout with cancer seems so fitting in this perspective: “I take nothing for granted. I now have only good days or great days.” For me, it’s usually a bad day if not the end of the world when my boss asks me to come into work on the weekend, or when my professor assigns and extra chapter of reading. When I woke up this morning dreading the return to work, I remembered the villagers and recognized what a spoiled brat I must be in God’s eyes.

The pursuit of happiness, prosperity, and wealth that has haunted my life experience thus far, seems rather trivial in light of the struggles that our friends in Nuevo Renacer deal with every day. Switchfoot has a song on their latest album called “Happy is a Yuppie Word.” When asked about the meaning behind the song, the lead singer replied: “In 1991, when Rolling Stone interviewed Bob Dylan on the occasion of his 50th birthday, he gave a curious response when the interviewer asked him if he was happy. He fell silent for a few moments and stared at his hands. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘these are yuppie words, happiness and unhappiness. It’s not happiness or unhappiness, it’s either blessed or unblessed.’” I love that. In our society, we too often confuse happiness with material accumulation and getting the things we want. I know now that the way to peace of mind and heart is to realize that the Lord has blessed me beyond my needs in order that I might be a blessing to others. This trip has been a great window into that realization…”

~ John

John’s words reflect the essence of what so many Agros Journey With A Village partners encounter when they travel to an Agros village. The restoration of hope, dignity, and gratitude is not reserved only for those living in a rural village, but it is also for those who are willing to serve and give of themselves. Gratitude is one of the highest and most healing of human expressions, no matter where you are on the economic ladder, no matter what country you live in.