From the Pekruls with Amor: Birthdays & Beans

Merry Afternoons Like These

Solo had his first birthday on the 4^th of August, and Luke had his twenty-ninth birthday on the 9^th.  We all partied together, along with some friends.  Steph made us all some Sesame Street party hats.  There was steak and dirt-cake.  Luke and Dave had a cigar and jicaro brandy while we all played a game of homemade shuffle-board with washers and some paddles cobbled together from old wood we had laying around the house. 

Merry afternoons like these have a special richness for us.  Besides being a celebration for a year of life, there is the quiet satisfaction of deepening roots: celebrating life that has budded in this place, on this ground, from which a home has grown with every happy, warm afternoon, each uniquely good because it was given to us here. 

Beans Are Life

August is one of the quietest months at work because at the end of July the rain stops and the red bean harvest starts.  Nuevas Esperanzas rarely works without community participation, and once the harvest begins there is little time for anything besides the harvest, because beans are life.  One of the main sources of sustenance for the people living in the hillside communities where we work are the beans they grow.  The sale of surplus beans is their biggest source of income. 

For a good bean harvest one needs just the right amount of rain, and the right amount of sun, at the right time.  The rains start in May, and the farmers plant their first crop of red beans.  About two months later the rains stop for a month, just as the beans are ready to be harvested.  The bean plants are torn up by their roots, tied in bundles and left to dry in the sun.  Once they have dried, the plants are gathered in piles and threshed by hand, that is, they are beaten with sticks until the beans fall out of the pods.  (Here’s a video of what manual bean threshing looks like.) The beans are collected, cleaned, put out to dry again in the sun for three days, and then put in 100 pound sacks for sale or storage.

The sun is key for a good harvest.  If the harvested bean plants don’t dry sufficiently, the beans will stick to their pods, and can’t be threshed.  Most will rot in the field.  If they are threshed but can’t be dried in the sun for three full days, too much moister will remain in the bean and many will be ruined by mold in storage.  This is why, when we asked teenage boys in the community what they worry and pray about the most, the weather was one of the things at the top of their list.  So while August may mean a pause for some our projects, there are still important things to pray for, like the sun.