Chopticon grad, Chaptico church team up to aid Hondurans

Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Click here to enlarge this photo Photo Courtesy of Sara Schaefer Sara Schaefer works with a coffee farmer in San Miguelito, Honduras. Schaefer is a volunteer with the Peace Corps and, with the help of Christ Episcopal Church in Chaptico, is working to help establish a coffee cooperative that will enable farmers to earn fair profits for their crops. E-Mail This Article | Print This Story

Now, after volunteering for more than a year in the municipality of San Miguelito, Schaefer and Christ Episcopal Church in Chaptico are hoping to make a difference in the lives of hundreds of people in a poverty-stricken region.

‘‘There is a common saying here: ‘siempre en la lucha,’ or ‘always in the struggle,’ and it’s very true about day-to-day life here,” said Schaefer, a 1996 graduate of Chopticon High School from Mechanicsville.

Schaefer, a Peace Corps volunteer, and the Chaptico church are working to use coffee beans to ease those daily struggles, through a cooperative.

‘‘They harvest the coffee beans but they don’t have access to the processing equipment necessary to yield quality beans,” Schaefer said via e-mail. ‘‘Thus, they have no choice but to sell the beans to intermediaries for very low prices, earning almost no profit to support themselves and their families.”

Schaefer’s involvement started after Gomez, who is the president of the cooperative, came to ask for help in getting the cooperative through its initial phases. Through the cooperative, farmers have come together to build the facilities necessary for quality bean production, with the hope that doing so will yield higher profits because they will be able to sell the beans more directly on the market. The cooperative is also a way for the farmers to seek Fair Trade Certification, which guarantees fair profits on crops. Gomez told Schaefer the day he knocked on her door that the cooperative would be way to reduce poverty and help the municipality.

‘‘Bringing this cooperative into this community will provide a sustainable boost for the economy of San Miguelito,” Schaefer said.

It is also a means of providing employment to Hondurans, many of whom Schaefer said leave their country to become illegal immigrants in the United States so they can earn money to send to the wives and the children they leave behind.

‘‘There are no jobs in Honduras and they cannot survive,” she said.

Currently, Schaefer and Christ Episcopal Church are working to meet the most immediate need of the cooperative, which is to build a roof over a drying facility so the beans will be covered. A roof will protect the beans from rain, which prevents them from being considered for Fair Trade Certification.

‘‘In order to get Fair Trade Certification they had to improve the quality of the bean, which means they had to stop the degrading of it by the weather,” said Lynn Erwin, outreach committee chairperson at Christ Episcopal. ‘‘They were stuck between a rock and a hard place.”

Christ Episcopal joined the coffee cooperative project when Erwin began thinking about a way to reinvigorate the church’s outreach program. As a friend of the Schaefers, who are not members of the Chaptico church’s congregation, Erwin knew about Sara’s Peace Corps work and began researching how the church could help.

‘‘I contacted [Schaefer] and I knew she was working in women’s health and nutrition ... and I fully expected her to say ‘we need such and such for the clinic,’ and she didn’t,” Erwin said. ‘‘She said ‘we need to get the coffee co-op up and going.’”

The goal of the outreach committee is to raise $4,200, the total cost of the roof, Erwin said. So far, the church has raised about a third of that through collections and is planning to hold fundraising events to raise the remainder of the money.

But even with a completed roof, the co-op will need more. Erwin said a total of $150,000 is needed to get the entire cooperative up and going like it needs to be. Any help is a big help, though.

‘‘This will be great for the economy of the area,” said Alexis Schaefer, Sara’s mother. ‘‘It’s really great what they’re doing to help out.”

‘‘At this point they aren’t even making enough for their families to live on,” Erwin said. ‘‘This is a sad story but it’s a very, very common story.”

According to Sara Schaefer, establishing the coffee co-op is a critical aspect of helping to establish a sustainable economy in Honduras, as well as healthier families.

‘‘Basically, I am trying to teach the people of San Miguelito to use the resources that they have to better their lives,” Schaefer said. ‘‘The cooperative project will bring more resources into their lives, as well as increase the productivity and opportunity here in this rural, poverty-stricken area.”

‘‘I’ve discovered that what Sara’s doing is amazingly hard work,” Erwin said. ‘‘I’m really impressed by her motivations and her dedication to stick it out. ... She understood quite quickly that in order for their health to improve their economic stability has to be [there] and anything else is a Band-Aid.”

Schaefer is also working to reduce maternal and infant mortality, childhood disease and malnutrition; educating about hygienic practices and disease prevention; creating community level systems of transportation in rural villages to deal with emergencies that occur during childbirth and pregnancy; and working with schools to better food security. Schaefer is also involved with a non-government organization called WASH, which helps fund projects for water and sanitation health. And aside from the coffee cooperative, Schaefer is also raising money for a maternal health project and a child survival project.

Whether she feels she is making a difference or not depends on the day.

‘‘Some days yes and some days no,” she said. ‘‘I am now, just after a year, beginning to see people begin to accept me and respond to my efforts.”

And, though she said she sometimes feels underappreciated for what she does, ‘‘you have to get over that in this type of work. I know I’m getting great experience and have learned to be thankful about where I come from.”

E-mail Meagan Boswell at mboswell@somdnews.com.