We took our group to a small coffee community outside of Matagalpa. My co-instructor first met the community while working for Witness for Peace. For whatever reason we had been tossing around the words "co-op" and "permaculture" describing this community to our students. When we arrived the other day we realized we were a wee bit wrong.

Our main contact, a Mr. Vicente Padilla, is indeed a known human rights case in Nicaragua who has fought many, many years for his land and struggles - and has a family-run organic coffee production on his very own bit of land. But turns out the rest of the community works on a giant, foreign-owned coffee plantation and the people do not own the land nor the wooden shacks they live in.

Our students went into home stays asking about being members of a "co-op" and the people were like, Huh? Many of our students went out into the fields in the morning with their families to cut coffee and realized the people, including their small children were working hours and hours cutting coffee on a plantation, not their land nor a co-op. So, as you can imagine, quite the learning experience! Also, students realized they were "romanticizing" farming and working in the fields. One student in particular, a real thinker, told us about the moment she realized she was "tired of cutting coffee" and that saying she was tired immediately became silly because no one else in the family could afford to be "tired." One student plainly said, I've never seen a place this poor. I can't imagine the person I might be now if at age 18 I had realized or seen any of this.

We've also had problems, in just the last couple days since going out there, with drunk locals. Aggressive, offensive, mean. So needless to say, visiting this community has not been what we expected, yet a very real and sobering reminder of "unpolished" poverty and that things are complicated. I say "unpolished poverty" because I think we take our students to places that are indeed poor but somehow organized in order to accept foreigners and deal them the blow of poverty in a softer-ish way. Take for example, um, everything we've done so far. We haven't stumbled upon something so wrong without explanation or preparation.

I struggled with Vicente's wife and family structure. For the various meals I ate at the house, his wife never sat at the table with us. She rarely spoke and maintained herself in the kitchen. I asked why she doesn't eat with all of us and he said, She doesn't like to. All the while Vicente is talking about war, struggle, educating his children, sustainability. I don't really know him, barely spent more than 48 hours in that house, but something seemed off-balance.

I am back in Matagalpa now with only a couple of students due to a home stay family problem. We'll meet the rest of the group tomorrow morning. So because of this, I'm not able to hear Vincente's full story - so my observations could be wrong. But honestly, I was a little relieved to leave the community.