Vignettes on Returning III

What we enjoy in travel lives at home in networks which bring our disparate connections closer.

As we return to mainstream purchasing norms, we want to emulate and support the kinds of projects, at home and abroad, that build positive connections. Thus far, since we have been home and purchasing, we have bought what we were going to immediately consume; bought small gifts for friends; or, purchased reusable/recyclable items at thrift stores.

Wherever possible, we would prefer to buy locally, or when necessary, from projects like Café Congo.

Our connectivity which we realize is a mere six-degrees or less of a connection to every person we met along our trip abroad is heightened as we meet and solidify relations which are changed since we left almost a year ago. There are new characters and welcome additions. As we celebrate one year of our commitment to each other, our relationships to friends and family broadens. I have met Aunt Liddy and Uncle Dykestra on my wife’s side. We both made lots of new relations attending cousin-in-law Isaac’s birthday celebration. Finding new connections through family which drew us back to Colombia, Italy, and Iowa meant a lot to us.

Sometimes these connections are born without any immediate knowledge of who these new peers and friends will be - solely based on our attitude of acceptance of our connectedness alone. Our degrees of separation grow fewer.

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Vignettes on Returning IV

This morning at breakfast, we drank coffee imported from Nicaragua. We want to promote fair-trade and community self-sufficiency through relations between the USA and abroad. A friend of a cousin’s of Brittany offers her own branding and message to us through her coffee. She has a virtual coffee import business - ‘Café Congo’ working with a group in Nicaragua named Brothers and Sisters in Reconciliation.

Café Congo uses first-hand knowledge of producer/consumer behavior to promote global initiatives locally. Profits raised by Café Congo’s grassroots efforts develop into ongoing projects for local villages in Nicaragua. These sustainable eco-friendly projects convert manures to natural gases, build grey water systems, install compost toilets, and distribute water filtration systems to shade grown organic crops.

These grassroots projects contribute to growth of organic farming, restoration of biodiversity, fight poverty, restore the cultural and environmental region, and prevent global warming. Through the purchase of her coffee, “you are reconciling [the farmers] goals with your own; your world with theirs.”

The use of coffee trade as a tool for building cultural, social, and economic resiliency is one which we seek to promote and teach. It is but one example of many.

The farmers of Hermanos y Hermanas para la reconciliation - or Brothers and Sisters for the Reconciliation is a new example we like. They are a very small rural cooperative associated with the larger Compas de Nicaragua (www.compas1.org). These rural farmers are working to broaden local goals and unite them with larger communities. They seek, “to reconcile polarized political ideologies, a turbulent history, and Nicaragua’s environment, health, and national quality of life.”

Organizations like Café Congo often come about locally just as relationships. Sometimes Britt and I use this type of micro-enterprise initiative by buying larger than needed organic coffee, in Minca, Colombia near our hotels in Santa Marta and Taganga. We support local organic growers union by purchasing extra coffee from them directly instead of through second party distributors. We then transport coffee to the USA.

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