Skim milk, one Splenda?

My funny, smart, and quirky roommate Nicole introduced me to one of her interesting habit during our senior year in college. She saw the fiscal world in terms of coffee—if she were to pay an electric bill, she might comment that the bill was worth thirteen coffees. A clearer explanation is as followed: 2 dollars roughly equals 1 medium coffee from LaSalle Bakery in Providence, RI. Nicole and I, along with many of our friends, consumed mass amounts of coffee during our tenure as students at Providence College. It was our comfort and our pick-me-up, and we always looked forward to treating ourselves to a cup.

Coffee is everywhere in Jamaica, but in a far different sense than in Rhode Island, where coffee shops appear every quarter mile. No, it is the coffee plant that is omnipresent here, particularly in Mount Friendship, the community where I now work as a volunteer (for 50 coffees per month).


There are many small coffee farmers in Mount Friendship, but I have grown particularly close to one. Jerome is a reflective man who thinks deeply about a host of topics, including Jamaican sports, violence, corruption, and the availability of water for the poor. When he heard about my passion for coffee, he was eager to fill me in on the coffee trade in Jamaica. And I was eager to learn.

As we walked through his small grove, Jerome pausing periodically to pull a slug off of a tree, I learned interesting facts about growing coffee. The coffee bean grows in a soft, fruit-like casing, and a farmer will know when it is ripe when this berry-like bean turns from green to bright red. I learned that when a tree makes more beans than it can sustain, some beans will turn black. I learned that a tree bears the best beans at two years’ maturity. Jerome also proudly mentioned that he would never sell a bean that had already fallen to the ground; this bean could have rotted, and he would not risk his reputation.


Coffee bean buyers come to some of the most rural and poorest communities in Jamaica to buy their harvests. Once these buyers purchase the beans, they will be taken to factories to be pulped (taken out of the casing), laid out in the sun to dry, and then roasted and ground.

Procedures vary, but usually a farmer will take away one payment during the transaction with the buyer and will receive a final payment several months later. The boxes that farmers must fill to the brim are enormous, and most farmers will only take away three thousand Jamaican dollars (roughly forty U.S. dollars) for one box.

Coffee farming is a tricky business. Farmers often lead a hand-to-mouth existence; many families have sadly explained to me that they go without medication, school books, or food until the time of the coffee harvest. Also, these farmers frequently run the risk of being duped by corrupt bean buyers. “It a bad business a bad men,” Jerome warned me once in a thick Patois accent. The health of the plants also depends upon a vigilant, experienced eye and a temperate growing season. Tropical Storm Gustav recently wiped out many farmers’ coffee harvests.

My dear friend Nicole was the first one that taught me how to view the world in terms of coffee, but she isn’t the last. Jerome is one of many farmers throughout the world who measure their lives in pounds of coffee. I once watched my gentle friend lovingly examine one of his coffee plants and I realized just how much coffee means to him. Coffee used to get me through my 8:30 philosophy class, but coffee provides Jerome and his wife with food and with medication for their hypertension and diabetes.

Blue Mountain Coffee, or a nameless blend of coffee from the foothills and the mountains, sells for exorbitant prices abroad, but the farmers are paid a pittance. I do not know how to make Jerome’s farming lifestyle easier, but I can remember the work of the coffee farmers throughout the developing world as I enjoy my morning java.