Colombia: WWOOF on a Chocolate farm

TDLR;

I got to milk a cow, take care of horses and goats, learn how chocolate is made seed to bar, and had a wonderful family to stay with. All only for a few hours of my day everyday, and round trip fare to and from the farm.

Click here for the drone video!

WWOOF set up:

Colombia is known for its coffee beans, but chocolate, too! A lot of the single sourced chocolate bars are from Colombia, and particularly the Santander department. Since I wanted to work on a farm, practice Spanish, and eat a lot of chocolate, I found a farm to work at (through WWOOF — a paid online network service that connects volunteers to farms) in Carmen de Chucuri, Santander.

First, communication was hard. The farmers don’t often have internet connection, they don’t check their email often, and usually won’t have a website for more information. Thankfully, this place had a facebook page (the owner is a social media fan) so I was able to confirm photos of where I would stay, the farm, the address, etc.

Getting there:

First I flew to Barrancabermeja airport. This city, according to locals from different cities, is the hottest area in Colombia — easily reaching 100+ degree weather with ultra humidity. But from this tiny hot town airport, I took a taxi to get to a bus “station” that was really just a hole in the wall shop with seats sit in to wait. There, you sort of have to watch out to see when people get up to look out to check for the arrival of the bus (no official notice, so if you don’t speak Spanish, hope for nice people). The bus took me to a town called Carmen de Chucuri, which was a flat town, smaller than many US college campuses. There I met up with my host, and his friend to grab a bite and chat. We went out to a bar owned by a friend of my host (everyone knows each other in this town) to learn how to salsa and merengue for a few hours. I spent that night in a spare “bedroom” that my hosts’ parents had in their house.

There is 1 bus per day that goes to the farm, and 1 bus that comes to the town from the farm. So I hopped on one at 1PM with the son of the friend of the host — Diego — who loved to chat and liked my kindle a lot. After about two hours on uncovered bumpy roads (the road is so bumpy that my phone from my lap jumped and almost got thrown out of the open window) the bus stopped at a construction site on the road and dropped us off. From there, we had to walk up a small hill and wait for another bus to come pick us up from there. This was problematic for some people since they were bringing chickens and onions and bananas and all sorts of goods with them.

The bus makes frequent stops to pick up a rando person off the dirt road, or to drop off some delivery goods to randos also waiting on the dirt roads for this single bus to come.

After a total of 4 hours, I arrived at the last stop, which was a 30 minute walk to the farm. Two other volunteers — Naibi and Julia — were there to greet me with rainboots on their feet (workboots of choice in this area) and waterbottles in their hands. Julia was full of energy and talked fast, while Naibi felt like a dependable older sister with her calm demeanor.

Life on the farm:

The farm that I would spend a lot of time on was just half of it. Another area ~30 minutes uphill had orange trees and cacao trees. The part the family lived on had open fields with pigs, chickens, cows, horses, goats/sheep, some cacao trees, a house for the family, and a house for the volunteers, workers, and travelers.

On the edge of the farm was a small stream that branched into a large river that made the weather here in the valley a lot more livable than in the city of Barrancabermeja. Down here, there are more cacao trees, so we went and snuck into the field to crack open some fresh cacao and nibble on the meat! The weather, despite the river, is still pretty hot during the day. During the night, cold enough to want a blanket, and once in a while it would pour rain for maybe a few hours but no more than that.

The family is that of the older sister of my host, and they have a partnership going on. The older sister’s fam and workers would work the cacao on a daily basis, and my host works with other businesses to sell their cacao to luxury chocolatiers. There were two couples living there, with three kids. One was in his teens and would take the bus at 4am to get to school and come back in the evening. The other two were girls of 4 years and <1 year old: Laura + Darly. Kelly — Darly’s mom — stays home and takes care of the house, while Clara — Laura’s mom — goes to school to teach since she is a professor. The men go out into the field to pick cacao, or otherwise work on the farm.

Laura — my best friend during my stay here — can’t count, she sucks at origami, and she couldn’t pronounce naranja for the longest time. But she is adorable, bright, loving, and amazingly chic. When I asked her where one of the sick dogs was, she nonchanlantly said, probably dead somewhere. Amazing. She loves it when Nai says, “carrrmen de chucuri!” and loved pretending we were riding a horse on the hammock. She’d always ask why, and never say the last syllable of “cansada.”

Dinners around 8pm is when everyone gathers in the dining room and living room to eat, chat, and watch TV together. Discussion topics are just like any old family dinner, except here it is in Spanish. And they talk fast, using farm lingo, and without moving their mouths too much! Apparently this is the Colombian style, so for the first few days, I sat there being confused and pretending to laugh when everyone else did. After a few days, I started to adjust and be able to join in on the conversation!

Besides the family and workers (who are considered a part of the family), a group of dogs and chickens and cats always hung around the house looking for food and attention. In the cabin (where I slept) we had frog friends, bug visitors, and bats flying in and out. The cabin didn’t have a door, and the rooms had doors but an open hole for a window, so there was not much protection from the “outside.”

Having lived in a large city all my conscious life, we have always had a washing machine. Here, there was only signal (E, and H sometimes if you were lucky) at one corner on the 2nd floor, so Nai and I would sit there, drink mate, and try to send a message or two while talking.

And there was no washing machine. There was no hot water, and there was of course no air conditioner. So for the first time in my life, I did a whole load of laundry by hand. In Colombia, they use this very rough brush to get the stains out of your clothes. Unfortunately, this also probably kills whatever clothes you have, because it is so rough.

At this farm, you eat four meals a day. Breakfast, piquete, lunch, and then dinner.

For breakfast, you get a piece of cojada — a cheese-like thing made from cow milk — with a Santander style hot crispy and dense arepa. With this, you have a cup of tinto — black coffee, home roasted — and a bowl of a usually starchy soup. It reminded me a lot of a soup that my mom would often make with eggs and potatoes in it.

For piquete, lunch, and dinner, Kelly would serve everyone a plateful of food. Usually a combo of very salty meat, some rice mush/veggie mush, and either fried plantain or maduro. Plantains, though in the states is an unsweet banana, is a different type of fruit used as a vegetable. If eaten ripe (very sweet, and often fried with cheese), it is called a maduro. At night, we drank agua panela (water, fresh cow milk, and melted panela — a Colombian take on raw sugar) or some coffee. On a good day, Kelly or one of the volunteers made limade and put it in the fridge to drink after working in the sun.

Work on the farm:

On a normal day, you have a very flexible and undetermined schedule. You wake up whenever (naturally you will probably wake up early) and start finding things to do.

Goats: goats need very little attention. They will BAHH at you when they are hungry, and they will BAHH at you when they are bored. To solve both issues, you find a BBB tree, rip off some branches because this is the goats’ favorite food. You wave it in front of them and lead to wherever you want them to feed. They will hang out there for about an hour, so you also sit and hang out for an hour to make sure none of them venture too far. There were 16 or so goats, and four young ones. There was only one macho (male) and he was producing way too many babies, so the family decided to castrate it. They took a razor and some string and just snip snip slide out. The final procedure was some gasoline to prevent infections. Rough. Then one of the dogs took a testicle and ran away with it.

Cows: The cows here need to be moved and the babies separated in the evening to get milk from the mothers in the morning. In the morning you grab a big stick to make you look like the boss around there, and start mooooing at the cows and getting them into the barn. This part is a bit sad, but reunite the baby with the mom for just a bit to get the milk flowing, separate them again, and start milking away. Each cow seems to have produced a gallon+ every morning.

Horse: The horses here were the least maintenance. They just hang out and eat on their own, and once in a while, someone would bring the horse out for a ride and let it graze on a more nutritious grass. The horses here are generally a lot shorter than the American counterparts, I saw.

Besides taking care of the animals, I also had to shoo and clean up after the chickens that constantly pooped on the porch of the house. Because the whole house really didn’t have a door to the living room, kitchen, or dining area, everywhere had a layer of dust at any given time of the day. So every morning, we would sweep and mop to start it fresh. The volunteers also helped out in the kitchen when Kelly needed it, do laundry, and take piquete food to the men working out on the cacao farm ~30 minutes a hike away. We’d also do odd jobs like roast coffee for the family to use, and baby sit. Once in a while the volunteers would attempt something like bunuelos. When we did, they looked like fetuses.

The main job though was to take care of the cacao beans:

The fruit: sometimes volunteers would go to the other farm to help pick the cacao. With long poles, skilled workers would knock down the cacao fruits that were ready and pile them up. With a machete, someone slices the cacao open, and a few other people with buckets start scraping the insides out into the bucket, not damaging the meat but taking out the veins in the fruit. The clear beautiful white ones go in the A bin, and the ones that are rotten or infested with bugs (still usable!) go in the B bin.

Fermentation: the cacao beans that we’ve separated from the shell now goes in a large wooden crate which we cover with plastic to keep the heat of the fermentation in. Once or twice a day, we flip the cacao over to make sure the beans are evenly fermented. It’s hot, there are bugs crawling all over, and it gets under your nails and takes twenty minutes to clean up.

Drying: After the pleasant fermentation business, the beans then are moved to the roof of the house. The roof has been built so that there are two parts: one part to actually serve as the ceiling of the house, and one to serve as the roof that slides over and away from the house. When it is sunny, we slide the roof away to dry, and when it rains, we cover it to protect the beans. There is a hole built into the ceiling to make moving satchels of beans up and down easier. Then the volunteers at the top spread out the beans with a rake making sure to not damage or break apart the beans. Everyday, we measure the humidity of the beans, and once it has reached an optimal level, we take it down, filter out any dried veins or twigs that made it in the pile, and send it to a facility for them to use for chocolate.

Chocolate making: OR. we take some of those and make chocolate ourselves! First, we roast it over a low fire and peel the beans. Then we put it through a grinder with some sugar. For drinking chocolate, you take this and knead it into small balls and store them just like that (like the chuocos). For eating chocolate, we put the ground chocolate powder in a chocolate making machine that grinds it into a finer granularity overnight. That, then, we cool a bit before we place it in the molds for the final product!

Benefits of working at a chocolate farm:

Towards the end of my stay, I also used my drone to film footages of the farm for my host — Miguel — and helped dig a ditch for the pipe that he would install. That was the most laborious work I did during my whole stay.

Besides what can be put in writing or categorized under different types of work, we’ve had fellow friend farmers visiting, playing with the horses and dogs, bath times for the kids that always end in a fun disaster, but also ants crawling over the dried laundry, huge huge bugs that were bigger than many birds, and the tears from the burning logs in the kitchen stove.

Every day was somewhat monotonous but there was a peace that was more tha

n just relaxation. The lack of internet and just other people and things made me also a simpler and more honest of a person. Having had a busy city life for years and a successful career I enjoy, I would have 100% gotten bored of staying there for too long. But the two weeks I spent was enough for me to realize that them, without the fancy tech, aren’t the only ones missing out on something in the world. D’AWW, me.

I came back to town and talked (for a few hours) to a family who wanted me to stay over their house! I politely declined but took ~30 photos with them. I think they thought it was cool that I was an Asian foreigner from the states.