Higher Grounds Trading Co. First Annual Holiday Gift Gala featuring a Bay Bucks Mini-Market, Trunk Show with wares direct from Kenya and India plus sample local foods from Scott’s Harbor Grill, Food For Thought, Grocer’s Daughter, Naturally Nutty Peanut Butters, Fresh Food Partnership, Pleasanton Bakery and more.

Where: Higher Grounds Trading Co.
When: Saturday Dec. 1st , 11:00 – 5:00
Join the holiday fun at Higher Grounds Trading!
Bring your Bay Bucks (or get them here).

Local foods will be sampled throughout the day!

Ladies, join us from 2:00 - 5:00 for Grocer’s Daugter’s chocolates and locally-made wines.
Bring a gift for the MI Youth Opportunities program (an organization working with youth aged 18 - 24 who are transitioning out of foster care) and get a free cup of coffee! MI Youth Opportunities is requesting gas cards, mittens, hats, gift certificates for restaurants, groceries, small appliances or other similar items)

Its official! At long last Higher Grounds Trading Co. has made its debut in the world of beer. That’s right, Shorts Brewing Company has concocted quite the mean Coffee Creme Stout using our Mayan Magic Espresso Blend. Last night I had the pleasure of sipping on a few as we rented a bus and made the 45 minute trek to visit Joe Short and his crew and celebrate the achievement.

Notes of chocolate with a creme - like body fill the mouth as that all-to-familiar dark roasted coffee flavor graces the aftertaste with each sip. If you are in Bellaire, be sure to stop by and enjoy a pint. If not and you want to learn about the similarities between beer and coffee, visit our other blog, Bean Activist, and read the article by our good friend and expert on all things beer, Chris O’brien. Its aptly titled…….wait for it, wait for it, ………….. “Beer and Coffee.”

Harvest Tour: Fair Trade and Indigenous Autonomy in the Mayan Highlands
February 11th - February 18th, 2008

Join us on an adventure through the Mayan Highlands of Chiapas, Mexico where we’ll be meeting up with our many partners in the struggle for a just and dignified world. We’ll be visiting two organic and fair trade coffee co-ops working to create community sustainability and various autonomous projects that your coffee dollars support here at Higher Grounds. Click here for more information

The Guatemala City Cemetery sits in Zone 3 overlooking the 50-year-old city garbage dump. The dead and their mourners watch as 3 garbage trucks enter each minute to dispense the cities trash at one of the largest garbage dump in Latin America. From the cemetery, 2000 workers sorting through the filth appear to be ants in the bottom of a vast pit – one that some could easily

be mistaken for hell. 80% of the workers are indigenous, 85% are women – castaways of the global economy, many of them migrating to the city from coffee growing communities. They work 6 am to 6 pm and earn a total of 15 quetzales, barely 2 dollars. Besides the obvious dangers of broken glass, bacteria, bugs, illness, the workers are exposed to high levels of methane gas.

As I stare into the nearly endless pile of trash, Fredy Maldonado, director of donations and special projects as Safe Passage, and guide for the day tells me in broken English, “Chris we must go quickly, it is lonely here.�

Lonely is an understatement. Vultures hover overhead. Old coffins pile up at the bottom of the cliff at the garbage dumps’ edge. Cemetery guards throw corpses into the pit if their families have not paid the 12-dollar yearly fee. Graves, decaying shrines, garbage, vultures, and open caskets surround me – the place is begging to be the locale for a horror flick.

“Yes, I know it is a lonely place Fredy, but I’ve come a long way to learn about Safe Passage. Just let me walk around a little bit and take it all in.â€? I tell him, indignant and attempting to flex my power as guest and donor. After Jody and I were contacted by the Friends of Safe Passages in Traverse City to create a Coffee for Change coffee to raise funds for the school, I’ve arrived to learn about the project first hand and I’m not ready to go. It doesn’t work though. Fredy realized that I don’t understand him and he switches to Spanish to clarify.

�We are alone here Chris, it is very dangerous. Someone can come and rob us. Usually we have guards but your visit was last minute so I didn’t get a chance to have one come with us.� Being in one of the worst parts of town in arguably the most dangerous capital city in Latin America he has a point. Each week over 50 people are murdered in this city. 6000 people are murdered a year in the country - more then all of our soldiers fighting in two wars. He grabs my bag and we scurry toward the car heading back to Safe Passage.

Wherever I’ve found poverty throughout the world, I’ve encountered well-intentioned foreigners desperately trying to “help.� Safe Passage is a rare example of a foreigner coming to the underdeveloped world, having a pipe dream to “help the people� and actually doing it.

Hanley Denning founded Safe Passage as an oasis for the children of the garbage dump in 1999. Eight years later, the after school program and early intervention program care for over 600 children who without the program are left on the streets and the slums as their parents toil away in the dump.

Health care, meals, supplementary education, and most important Fredy tells me, love, is provided unconditionally free of charge. In a tragic turn of events, Hanley died last year in a fatal automobile accident. Her vision continues on as over 600 volunteers come from around the world each year to work with the children. Amidst, death and the dump, Safe Passage provides a ray of hope to the poorest of the poor in Guatemala.

You may have noticed our new banner above…Fancy, I know.

Unfortunately, in the process of updating we lost all of our earlier BLOG entries. We have tried to replace them with some creative cut and pasting, but many of the images that go with the entries will take more time to get back up in the proper places. Stay with us, in time, you won’t even notice anything is missing.

Peace, love and good coffee.

There are few places more stunning in the world then Lago Atitlan (aka Chol Lake to the Ka’ckchiquel Maya) in the Guatemalan highlands. The lake is the result of a huge volcanic explosion over 85,000 years ago. Today 3 mammoth volcanos grace its shores and Mayan communities dot its borders. After settling the area in the 1200’s,

here multiple ethnicities of the Mayan people live today. Tourism, coffee farming, and traditional weaving are the main sources of income for the Mayan communities, but a small group has found a unique way to find a fair wage for their craft.

Los Cuchareros are a group of nine Ka´ckchiquel Maya who are artisans of the handmade spoon. From soup ladels to coffee scoops, the Cuchareros gather wood from old coffee trees and shade trees in coffee fields to craft their spoons with great care.

Fray, Julio, Martin, Antonio, Mayses, Adonias, Lesvia, Claudia, and Florinda spend hours each day, cutting, sawing and carving each spoon by hand. Natural Sealants such as Bees Wax and Candle Wax are used to seal the spoons. It is hard not to recognize the craftsmanship of the spoons as Fray Gerber Jacinto Campor mentioned as he hands me the order I will carry back home, “No two products are the same Chris, we are artisans who make each product with our own hands.�

As we sit nearly a spoons’ (big ladle rather then small coffee scoop) throw from Lago Atitlan in the sleepy but culturally vibrant town of San Lucas Toliman, Volcano Toliman hovers overhead. The Cuchareros tell me that the order I have come to pick up for our Coffee Bar is their largest request yet. With the purchase of each spoon they provide $1 to $2 dollars to local elderly people. In Guatemala, the elderly receive a pension of less then $90 dollars a month. The income provided by the spoons goes along way to help the elders of their local community. 100% percent of the sale of each spoon goes directly into their pocket - no bureaucratic NGO administrative fees here!

If you are in Traverse City, stop by next week to check em out!

Chiapas visiting Maya Vinic. In a quick few days we’ve worked on preparations for a water project in the highland community of Chichilton, trekked to the top of a mountain to speak to the municipality of Chenalho via the Las Abejas radio station Chanul Pom, and had a great meeting with representatives from the co-op to discuss a

plethora of topics about this year’s harvest. With Monika Firl from Cooperative Coffees in tow, President Jose Vasquez - an old friend who came to the U.S. with us on a speaking tour a couple years ago- sat down and also signed contracts for 4 containers.

We also discussed Higher Grounds social premium of $2,800 given to the co-op in recognition of the deep partnership we have with the co-op. Many visits to the co-op have continually reminded us that our success is intricately related to theirs. As such we are providing a yearly bonus of $.15 per pound above the beyond fair trade price for all coffee we purchase from the co-op. This year the co-op has decided to fix their 3 ton truck which will allow them to travel to the various growing communities that make up the community to collect coffee. By doing so they will be communicating more regularly with the members and eliminate a costly expense for producers – delivering coffee to the co-op.

Maya Vinic is quickly positioning itself to be a highly successful cooperative in an industry where most are struggling to get by. They have vertically integrated – processing all coffee at their warehouse. After picking, washing, fermenting, drying, and sorting their beans, Maya Vinic is roasting non- export coffee for their national market under their own brand. Their national brand coffee is distributed throughout Mexico thereby providing an income for the coffee that is not sold to international buyers, such as Higher Grounds.

For that reason, I finished my adventure in Chiapas by providing a roasting and cupping training at Maya Vinic roastery and offices. More to come soon on that when I blog about the 3 other trainings I just completed in Guatemala.