It’s a pleasure to introduce you Lina Marcela Moreno, our Quality Promoter of Cerro Azul farm, where our best quality Geisha is produced. We admire her, and proud of her work, which is why we want to make a tribute through this article to her and the role that she performs at Café Granja La Esperanza. Marcela has been working with us for about 5 years and her dream is to keep working and growing next to the Café Granja’s family.
This first part of Lina Marcela’s story is named as perseverance. Lina Marcela started as a coffee picker, even though she had already played this role in other crops, at the beginning she had difficulty at CGLE crops because of the type of cherries she had to choose. She says that it’s not the same to collect “normal” coffee (as she calls it) than a coffee that will permit to reach the quality requirements to be export. She narrates that she had to spend a constant harvest time to get to collect the required number of cherries with the necessary characteristics. Many people give up in the process, but for her this wasn’t an option, the only thing she considered possible was to learn and reach her harvest objective. “Throughout the time, the most gratifying for me was that at one time I stood out from many people, both women and men.” – Lina Marcela Moreno
After a while, Marce as we call her, was promoted to a new role, quality promoter. As we have told you in previous articles, the functions of this role are to train the coffee pickers to collect the cherries at the maturity that we need and to make sure that the work of the coffee pickers was well done, validating that no uncollected fruits remain on the trees.
The hardest thing about this new position for her was the treatment with men. Usually, men that work in agrarian areas are the ones in charge of the quality promoter position, and assuming that a woman was in command of training them and supervise their work was strange and sometimes even annoying, which became a new challenge for Lina Marcela. This shows the strength and capacity of women.
This knew stage of Marce’s life is named respect. The way how she resolves all those uncomfortable moments was thinking everything is based on “the character with which I assume the comments, the respect she has for each of them, the way I talk, and corrects them” – Lina Marcela. The main learning that this role has left you is the way how she treats people, they learn to treat you in the same, nevertheless this is a hard process.
Finally, it’s gratifying for us to know that the dreams of our workers are part of this project. Marce’s main dream is studying something that helps her to grow in the agricultural world, but above all at Café Granja La Esperanza.
