Good-bye to the Farm!

Friday was our final day on the farm before heading to a B&B for our last few days in Hawaii. We finally got to work the big weed-whackers, which are extremely messy and fun. I wish we had before and after pictures of the giant elephant grass that was taller than we are that we cut down to nothing!

  This is me halfway through the morning...                          and Dave pre-weed-whacking

     Threw these clothes away yesterday                     These puppies followed us all over the farm!

After our last day on the farm, we finished the evening down at Pu'uhonua o Honaunau (Place of Refuge). I wrote about it in a previous post and had pictures of the beach, but we hadn't gone to see the ancient structures. This is the place where people who broke sacred laws could go to be absolved (if they could make it there before being caught and put to death).

The lele (tower) where the offerings were                   Ki'i (wooden images) stand watch over the

placed                                                                      mausoleum that holds the bones of 23 chiefs

Here we are with Bob and Beryl, our coffee-farming hosts. Every Friday night they gather with friends at the Place of Refuge for a potluck. They're in their 70s and bought the farm 10 years ago!

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They have 2 studios attached to their house, one downstairs that their daughter was staying in, and this second one around back. It may not look like much, but there were NO BUGS at all! That's more than I can say about the luxurious in-town condo we're staying in for our last couple of days...ehem..way too many ants.

The separate twin beds, reminiscent of the 1950s, were awesome for about a week. It was also fun learning to live minimalistically in the studio. We both realized that packing five shirts was still too many for three weeks.

And a few more pictures for the heck of it...

And of course, another beautiful sunset at the Place of Refuge!

Dave has one more coffee post that he will be putting up soon. We got to work with ripe coffee cherry, fresh off the trees, so we have finally seen the whole process. After that, more vacation-y things. I'm most excited about going up 14,000 ft to Mauna Kea!

Painted Church and House Blessing

This is St. Benedict Parish, an old Catholic church, aka the Painted Church. It is maybe 3 miles from our farm, located in Honaunau. In 1899 after the church was built, Father John Velghe painted the church with regular house paint on regular wood, with no formal training in painting. The domes painted behind and around the altar are my favorite part!  It still has a congregation and is involved in providing medical services to the local community.

The ceiling has rusty metal starts nailed all over it, my second favorite feature. Dave's favorite element is "the mix of classic European basilica-type imagery (see the altar above) with the indigenous palm trees (on the ceiling below). The images with more creation-centered themes are similar to the way the ancient Jewish temple was adorned, reminiscent of the Garden of Eden."

Most of his congregation couldn't read so he depicted biblical stories in murals on the walls. The murals include depictions of St. Francis receiving the Stigmata, Jesus rejecting the Devil, Cain killing Abel (with Eve trying to revive Abel!), and of course, no church building would be complete without showing the boiling torment of Hell.

We also went to a "traditional Hawaiian" house blessing--which was actually a 3-hour house warming party with 15 minutes of local culture. The multi-million dollar house was located in a gated community, complete with kidney-shaped lawn and terrace. It was catered, people brought orchids and other plants as presents, and everyone was white except the Kahu (spiritual guardian), his wife, and the performers. For the blessing, we all went outside in the rain and the Kahu tied two vines across the railing blocking the door. Then as the ceremony started, the new owners untied them and the Kahu said it was like cutting an umbilical cord as the home was born. You can see the vines on the railing in the picture. He and his wife started chanting in Hawaiian to ask "permission" of the spirits of the land for the new owners to move in. The owners followed him around each room of the house and then outside to the four corners of the grounds while chanting and sprinkling water.

At the close of the ceremony, he started speaking English again, and prayed to Jesus that the spirits, good or bad, would give permission for the family to live there in peace. Afterwards, they sang a song about the rich ruler who asked Jesus what he had to do in order to receive eternal life. The part of the story that was not quoted was Jesus' response: "Sell all that you have and distribute to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me" (Luke 18:22; see vv. 18-30). Then we ate good food, listened to this locally famous musician, and watched some hula dancing.

Dragon's Lair Coffee and the Process of Roasting

It is a well known fact on the island that more "Kona" coffee is sold than is grown. Dragon's Lair produces and roasts really good and honest coffee, and it is priced $5-10 cheaper than big distributors and what you can find online.

We roast to order so it is super fresh, and it means we get to roast and package instead of weed-whacking or sawing up trees! So, if you want to try some of our coffee, please do! We are here for another 10 days.

Order Dragon's Lair 100% Kona Coffee

Roasting is really fun! First, we heat up the tall, skinny roaster to about 300 degrees and turn the blower on. We pour around 9 lbs of green coffee in, and the blower keeps it moving and looking like a fountain of coffee. As the coffee heats up, it becomes lighter so we have to keep lowering the blower so it doesn't push the coffee over the sides.

The coffee turns from green to peanut-colored, then starts getting dark. At about 390 degrees, half of each coffee bean starts to pop and sounds just like popcorn! The popping continues for a few minutes and the roaster gets fuller as the beans expand. Then there is silence and the beans continue to heat up. If we are doing a medium roast, we wait for the temperature to reach about 440 degrees and dump the coffee out. But if we are doing a medium-dark roast, we wait until the second round of popping starts at around 450-455 degrees (only one side of the bean pops in the first round, and the other side starts popping in the second round). Once the second round of popping has just begun, we dump the medium-dark roast into the cooler and the popping continues for a few more minutes outside of the roaster.

Dumping the coffee out is a very high-stress process, believe it or not. Once we decide the coffee is done, we have about 3 seconds to save 9 pounds of $27/lbs. coffee from being ruined. All at once, we turn the heater off, turn the blower down, tilt the roaster so all the coffee falls into the cooling box, turn the blower back up, raise the roaster back up, and stir the coffee beans. Then, deep breath! 

Beaches

We've only been to 2 spots so far, but they are so different compared to east coast beaches! More diversity to come as we travel to other beaches next week.

These first 5 images are from Pu'uhonua, or "Place of Refuge," which is a national historic park less than 5 miles from our farm. If an ancient Hawaiian broke kapu, or sacred law, they could be put to death. If they reached this safe zone, however, a ritual would be performed where they were absolved of their crime and could return to society. Its a real life game of tag with a base where you can't be touched.

Side note: Look at the horizon in the picture below. It's hazy because of the sulfur dioxide from the active volcano Kilauea. They call it "vog"- volcanic smog.

 These sea urchins are absolutely everywhere. These small ones are in the tidal pools, and in the deep water they are a hundred times bigger and spikier.

The next two photos are from the beach right next to the Place of Refuge. It's called 2-Step Beach because the lava actually forms steps into the water (2 steps, if you can believe it), making an easy entrance for snorkelers and divers.

We saw this guy washed into a tidal pool before even entering the water to snorkel!

Finally, another beautiful sunset from the lanai (porch) at our farm.

The Coffee Process (Part 1...sort of)

This is only "sort of" the first part of the coffee process because it is not currently harvesting season and Mollie and I will not be able to document the cherry-picking. Of course, I could have begun also with planting.... Ok, so this is just the first post I'm making about the coffee process, not actually the first part of that process. Moving on.

The process you'll be able to see below is hand sorting beans--what Mollie and I have been doing the last two days. The beans are already in their green state, which means they have already been dried and hulled. All that is left is roasting. First, however, we have to sort them by hand. Before taking a step further, I want to emphasize that we spent an entire day and a half panning through only about 30 pounds of this stuff. Our necks hurt from basically looking at our navels hours on end. When we close our eyes, all we see are beans rolling around in an old pie tin. It's the most tedious and mesmerizing kind of work we've done so far.

When we sort, we are looking for three main things:

This is your happy and healthy typical coffee bean. Nice and smooth, having two even halves (which will pop at different temperatures during roasting! But I'll come to that in another post...).

This is an example of junk. Also known as crap. While we toss good beans into one bucket, we are also tossing this fine specimen into another. What has happened to this poor bean is the bore beetle, a plague on most of the farms around here. You can see where the beetle has had a meal. This affects about 25% of the crop. Interestingly, local studies show that the bore does not adversely affect the taste of the coffee. But, come on, who wants to see this when they open a bag of 100% Kona coffee?

NOTE: One former WWOOFer collected a pile of junk from Dragon's Lair and put it up against Starbucks coffee in several local blind taste tests. Dragon's Lair junk won hands down every time...

And then there's this gem. This is Peaberry. It's smaller and rounder than the regular bean. During development, only one half of the bean grew, and without the other half, it was able to grow all the way around the center. The result is a denser bean with more concentrated flavor, caffeine and nutrients. About 5% of every crop is Peaberry. This stuff sells for about 50% more than the regular bean.

During sorting, one of the only things that could keep our sanity was to start imagining the cliches that might arise from the process. For example, to describe a misfortune you might say, "Oh, that's like finding beetle bore in your Peaberry!"

And here's what we can roast and ship!

First Days on the Farm

This is the view from the porch where we eat breakfast every morning with the owners, Bob and Beryl. By Dave's second cup of 100% Kona coffee, he's in a place of absolute ecstasy. The rest of the day has a hard time measuring up.

We found this chameleon in a banana tree. He did not like Dave as much as this picture suggests.

Can you guess which Muscovy is a Sith lord?

The view from our studio apartment. Over ninety other WWOOFers have seen this.

Marmalade, whom I mistakenly and continually call Marshmallow.

This is in the coffee processing... place?... it's like a shanty. All the coffee making machinery is behind me (more on this to come!), but here you can see just how at home the chickens and ducks have made themselves. We regularly find a new eggs here, and this pretty Muscovy rarely leaves her nest under the table saw.

The journey from unripe coffee cherries to medium-dark roast beans is about three feet.

 

Had no idea what this was--it's a cacao tree! Perhaps I'll try to make some chocolate.

This tiny little tangerine tree is my favorite thing to eat off the farm, but I only get one about every other day. There are, however, tons of fresh pomegranates and papayas and literally hundreds of avocados. The bananas and passion fruit are green and won't be ready anytime soon. The trees that are not fruiting this time of year are mango, lime, lemon, and macadamia nut. I heard there are guava trees somewhere and I have no idea what that looks or tastes like, so potentially another thing to eat! (and the garden spiders are absolutely everywhere, along with ugly brown spiders that look like little transformers)

My favorite place on the farm, all the Muscovy ducks and chickens gather under the pomegranate tree to sleep and, occasionally, give us suspicious looks.

Hawaii for a month!

We're in Hawaii! Dave graduated from Duke last week (summa cum laude, no big deal) and I start PA school at Jefferson College in Roanoke, VA in August(!!). So, we decided to go to to the Big Island to work and live on an organic Kona coffee farm, spend some time at the nearby world class snorkeling sites, and maybe, just maybe, get a bit of a tan.

After 16 hours of traveling and a 6-hour time change, we arrived at Kona International Airport yesterday afternoon. Our farm is called Dragon's Lair Estate, that red star over there, which is staffed by the couple who owns it and WWOOFers (that's us). They have 2000 coffee trees and an assortment of macadamia nut, banana, mango, papaya, etc. Not sure what our work will entail but our first day of work starts in a few hours. Lots of pictures to come!

Studying and Doula-ing

Well it is time for midterms- I have 3 exams in the next 4 days. School is a lot different when you know your future depends on making good grades. I've done a lot of work today and now I'm waiting for my redbull to kick in so I can keep going!

Exciting news for this entry: I'm FINALLY on the calendar for being a doula at UNC hospitals! I did my training back in July and have been trying to get settled with UNC for volunteering. It took me 4 months to jump through all the hoops at Duke just to hang out with sick kids, and 3 months at UNC. A couple vaccinations, many orientations, and a TB test later, here I am. I get to shadow a labor and deliver nurse on Oct 24 and then I'm on call starting on the 27th!

I wanted to say some funny comments about how excited I am to meet women this way, since, you know, they will be so nice and laid back, but I'm not feeling very funny so here's a picture instead. I feel like I've been a walking dictionary for pregnant women for a few months now, so I'm glad I finally get to gain some experience (and get lots of patient contact hours).

I've heard many hilarious and terrifying stories about doulas having to kick out moms, mother-in-laws, deal with hysterical fathers, and such. I was worried about having to deal with that until I noticed that every single doula is extremely calm and soft-spoken, so if they can conjure that kind of authority then hopefully I'll be able to as well!

 Alright I will get back to work now. Dave is on fall break so I'm pretty upset that he gets to play guitar hero and hang out with his friends while I'm trying to memorize 8 chapters of medical terminology and teach myself chemistry. Fortunately he also gets to be the house keeper until I'm done on wednesday :) and then my parents will be visiting. Can't wait for my fall break!