Guatemalan coffee growers find hope in Catholic cooperative
The Green Coffee project, a program of Catholic Relief Services and Caritas San Marcos, is helping cooperative members in Guatemala with better planting techniques and soil management to improve the quality in coffee beans. They hope to help people stay in the country.
Angelita Paz, 18, from the village of Caserio Los Cardona, Guatemala, and Susana Mateo Cano, 25, a member of the Nuevo Eden, or New Eden, coffee cooperative in San Marcos, Guatemala, demonstrate the process of coffee bean quality control in early October. They learned the skill as part of the Green Coffee project supported by Catholic Relief Services and Caritas San Marcos in conjunction with the Anacafe National Coffee Association. (CNS photo/Judith Sudilovsky.)
Judith Sudilovsky
December 31, 2016
CATHOLIC NEWS SERVICE
SAN MARCOS, Guatemala - Six years after receiving a teaching degree, 25-year-old Susana Mateo Cano still has not gotten a teaching job because she has no connections in Guatemala’s educational system.
Frustrated by the lack of employment opportunities like many other young people in the region, three years ago Mateo Cano told her mother that she wanted to leave for the United States.
Mateo Cano said she felt “great sadness and anger” that her parents had sacrificed so much for her education and she was still unable to find work. After such a long stint of unemployment, she did not care about the dangers she would face along the migration path northward especially as a woman, she said.
“When she told me she was leaving I did not accept it,” said Mateo Cano’s mother, Odilia Cano, 55. “I am not ready for her to go far away from us.
https://cruxnow.com/global-church/2016/12/31/guatemalan-coffee-growers-find-hope-catholic-cooperative/