Farm(er) Friday February 10th, 2023
The Zavala-Yanes family gives all of us hope for the future
Adalid Zavala is an unlikely hero. He is friendly with everybody. He can talk for hours. He will promise everyone everything and give it all away. He should be poor, because of all of his generosity. But the man is a mechanical genius, and he has helped every member of his family develop and grow.
I didn’t know Adalid during my Peace Corps days in the 90s. He lived in Rio Negro, a coffee-growing village on the slopes of the Comayagua Mountain National Park. My job was to support the protection and development of the park, and I thought Rio Negro could become a tourist center. It was accessible by road and had an incredible trail through the cloud forest to an amazing waterfall. So we worked with some people in Rio Negro to get the tourism ball rolling. Then I left.
When I first returned to Rio Negro, 8 years after my Peace Corps time, the park authorities had built a visitor center, improved the waterfall trail, trained families in hosting and feeding tourists, and helped form an organic coffee co-op that also included handcraft training for the women. I was amazed. It was the full vision that I had only imagined during my Peace Corps time. That year was when I first met Adalid, although he remembered me from my Peace Corps days.
Adalid was one of the first coffee co-op members and he had made friends with my friend Hector, an agricultural engineer from the city. Hector had seen how Adalid could fix anything, and he had brought the idea of home-scale hydroelectric turbines to Adalid. Together they built the first designs, based on a Peruvian mini-turbine that you could fit in your two hands. All you needed was to capture some water from a stream, channel it into a 2-inch PVC pipe to gain pressure, and direct it to the turbine. Adalid used the turbine to run a generator to have electricity, as well as using the direct power to turn coffee depulping equipment.
Visiting Adalid’s house, we met Suyapa, his partner in life, who made handcrafts from discarded chip bags. When Farmer to Farmer started buying coffee from Honduras, I knew that we would be visiting Adalid and Suyapa every time we went to Rio Negro.
The years went by, and I saw Hector and Adalid bring hydropower to many households. Hector would confide in me that he thought that if Adalid had been born in a city, instead of a poor coffee-growing community, he would be a famous mechanical engineer by now. Everyone knew that if something was broken, you needed to bring it to Adalid. He always had a line-up of fix-it projects on the side, distracting him from farm work.
One year when I visited, Hector had helped Adalid to move to the city, so their daughter Cindy could go to secondary school. They had abandoned the farmhouse in Rio Negro, and only went to harvest and clear weeds once in a while. In the city, Adalid’s fame as a fix-it guy spread fast. Soon people from all over the mountain would bring their broken machines to have him fix them. When I would visit, he would just smile and wave his hand at piles of broken machines that everybody needed to be fixed, immediately. Then he would spend an hour talking to me or go off on a three-day adventure hike with me and Hector.
I came to know Adalid’s family through all the visits. When we would visit Rio Negro, or Hector’s farm, they would come along. There were Cindy and Dariela, the two girls. Cindy will always seem to be high school-aged in my head, and Dariela, a smiling 8-year-old. But time passes, and Dariela is married now and Cindy is in her twenties and has a son, Gael. Cindy is always coming and going on a motorcycle, and Dari lives in a nearby city with Dany, an organic coffee inspector.
Then there were the two older boys, Melvin, the oldest, and Disney, the younger. Both were away at high school when I was first visiting, but on later visits, they would be around a lot. Melvin had dreams of a professional life and maybe going to the states. Now he has settled into life in his dad’s workshop. His work has moved in new directions recently, including building coffee roasters and other equipment. Amazing stuff. Melvin and his wife Keylin have two children, Zadiel and Natalia. Both are blond, attesting to the persistent European influence on Honduran genetics.
Disney has become something of our unofficial guide over the last few years. Adalid is often swamped with work and he sends Disney out to accompany us when we visit Rio Negro or other coffee-growing communities. When Adalid first moved to the city, he and Hector started a small coffee roasting business. Disney was drafted to roast and deliver the coffee, and soon he took over the business as his own. For a while, he would run the roasted coffee all over the city on his motorcycle, but now he has a pickup truck and a little store that sits in a corner of the family compound. Disney recently took over the leadership of the coffee co-op from Adalid, who has had too much on his plate all along, and Disney has made great strides in organizing the growers.
There is one more child in the family, Hamcel, who is 8 years younger than all the other children. He is of an age with his nephew Zadiel. Hamcel is smart as a whip and is learning English in his free time.
Suyapa is the ever-present matriarch, always advocating for her family. When I think about how the family went from a tiny farmhouse on the side of the mountain to occupying a bustling compound in the middle of a fast-growing city, with all of the kids educated and building their best lives, I have to believe that none of this would have happened without Suyapa guiding things.
This year when I visited, I made a plan to pay for two nights at an Airbnb at the beach in Tela, a 4 hour's drive from the city of Comayagua. I invited the whole Zavala-Yanes family, and they all came! It was a blast, especially for the kids. Hamcel loves the water and would not leave the pool or ocean all day. He taught Zadiel to be brave. Natalia was thrilled to play in the waves.
After all the generosity their family has shown me over the years, I am pleased to be able to return a little bit of the spirit of reciprocity.
Post-script: Rio Negro is still an amazing place to visit. I highly recommend seeking out Avilio Velasquez and Bertilia Gonzales or Lucio Yanes and Ana Elisia for an experience off the beaten path of tourism. But Rio Negro never became the tourist center it could have been. The visitor center is abandoned. The trail is overgrown. The families that built tourist cottages have rented them out to coffee pickers. Tourism dried up in Honduras because of the violence due to gangs in the cities. Those gangs were born in the United States, and when gang members were systematically deported over the last 25 years, they flourished in Central America.
Wisconsin has been thawing, with beautiful sunny February days that get up into the 30s (Fahrenheit). I’m starting to think about maple syrup and starting seeds.
In writing news, I joined the publications Reciprocal and The Narrative Arc and had my first stories for both this week. I also reviewed my friend Joan Fletcher’s novel The Data Raiders. Finally, I published a whimsical listicle about Medium and Vocal.
I’m reading our February RaWBC book club selection, Sister, Mother, Warrior, by Vanessa Riley, and learning a lot about the Haitian Revolution. You can submit your own essay any day after February 28th.
© 2023 Andrew Gaertner. All rights reserved.
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