Mi vida esta confusanda.
Life is bloody complicated at the minute. I’ve been doing some real proper research in the real world, involving talking to real actual alive people, (as opposed to reading and regurgitating, or emailing). It’s HARD. And the more I learn, the more complicated it seems to get.
One real, actual alive person was helpful – Paul/Pablo from Caffe Nero head quarters. Unfortunately, what he told me has totally and utterly confused things even more. Maybe I was naiive to think it wasn’t that complicated. Tracing the origins of coffee is an immense task at the best of times, but when the only source of information I can get hold of at the moment is trying hard to protect the positive image adopted by their brand marketing, what I get is not exactly deep – or even that accurate.
It turns out, perhaps unsurprisingly, that Nero’s coffee does not come
rom the award winning co-operative in Brazil that they promoted on their website. Well, some of it does, but not the stuff they make into cappuccinos behind the bar every day. Instead, 600 tons of the stuff, comprised of seven different strains of coffee, is imported for Nero every year, coming from “Central and South America”. By the time it reaches Nero, it has been through the hands of the farmers, the co-operatives, the commercial exporters, the roasters and the distributors, not to mention all the regulatory bodies, and anyone in charge of overseas import tariffs and customs….. Far from buying “direct from the producers”, at least six different companies are involved in the industry from beans to mug.
And I’ve got to go through the whole bloody lot, looking for any opportunity in this vast network for coffee to be wasted. This may take a while. Not only is this a lot of work to get my head round, it also ladders my proverbial fishnets (instead of being a linear commodity chain, I’ve decided it’s now a complex mesh of a network – hence, commodity fishnets). There is a big hole in the proceedings now, and its quite embarrassing.
I had a plan… up until last week. That was, to go to Fazenda Cachoeira (Waterfall Farm) in Brazil, to find out the extent of wastage from a plantation that directly supplies Caffe Nero. This gave me something to concentrate on, prepare for; I would need to learn Portuguese for instance. It also gave me a time frame – I’d go in the harvest season, which is between March and September, 2009.
Now, it doesn’t matter if I go to Brazil, or any other coffee-producing country in Latin America. Going to a Spanish speaking country would be far more sensible… but then, when to go? And indeed, where? I need to find out the different harvest seasons…
For anyone who knows anything of my non-university plans at present, the timing of this is highly important. I don’t know which Plan should take priority, whether I should just let Que Sera, Sera, and rethink depending on what happens, or whether I should take assertive action, decide for definite that I am going to, say, Costa Rica in May 2009, and fit everything else around that. That might be the easy option.
Basically, I HATE planning when everything is a variable. I hate making important decisions that I might regret. I would far rather have life Just Happen to me, as it usually does. Or, I bury myself in trivialities, or wild fantasies which even I know are totally impractical – because even hampered with a short attention span and over-ambitious nature, those plans are always far more fun than the ones I actually need to focus on.
Jo is filling my fragile, wanton little mind with ideas of the RASC cafe – that is, my dream of my own coffee shop called Doctor Coffee’s, only promoted as an arts venture, so that we don’t have to worry about it actually making any money. It would be a social enterprise project, providing a space for the RASC writers to go create in. She was even on about hosting it in a caravan at one point so we don’t have to pay lease rates…. And all the while, I am sitting in Caffe Nero for days on end, studying coffee shops, when actually all I want to do is run one myself! This does not a productive Bel make.
fAnd then, there are other dreams… Latin America. Again. It is no longer really a case of wanting to go back there, it’s almost a sense of inevitability – I know I will someday, for whatever reason. I am sorely tempted to just say ’screw Nero’, go visit Donna in Nicaragua or El Porvenir in El Salvador, and just pretend they supply a big chain… but that would not constitute good research practice, would it? I would love to catch up with Donna and Diego and all the chavalos and payasos again out there, I still feel like I have ‘unfinished business’ in Nicaragua somehow, I was rushed away all too quick last time. Or I could go next door to Costa Rica or Honduras and see bits I am less familiar with… For that matter, I would love to catch up with mi familia en Peru…
Siempre yo siento como estoy malgasto mi vida, mi tiempo en este paid, cuando yo podría alli viviendo la vida en vez de lo estudiando. Soy demasiado impaciente. Tengo suenos de arroz y frijoles, y de aventuritas en climas lejos, quiero mas, siempre mas que este. Quiero una cambia.Yo me confundo con relaciones diferentes, los amores diferentes y entonces yo siempre siento que la necesidad de escaparse cuando todo falla. Yo no puedo ver lo que tiene razón bajo la nariz, que lo que quiero es ya aquí. Mi marido, mi niño, y todo que yo ya he creado aquí.
