Stories

Papa Fights the Fire
April is hot and dry, even up in our mountains. Walking along the dirt road, my feet stir up a cloud of dust. In just a few more weeks, the rain will come, but now everything is dry. When I walk down the path to our house, I see that a fire brigadier is talking to Mama and pointing to the mountains.

Sobresaliente Coffee
Only the best coffee is called "sobresaliente." Flora Hernandez peered through the window of the cupping lab. The cupper carefully counted out thirty coffee beans. Those were some of her coffee beans, plants she had raised and cared about for months.

Have You Seen Jesus?
Good questions require good answers. Juanita was always full of questions. "What makes the volcano steam?" she would ask. "Do horses like to pull carts through town?" "How do raindrops get into the sky?" Sometimes her family got tired of answering her questions.

Today's Picker, Tomorrow's Poet
Field work makes school possible. Ramon looked across the mountainside. Even though he was picking "shade-grown coffee," it did not feel very shady. True, the banana trees towered above the coffee plants, but the hot sunlight dappled through the leaves above him. He watched the sunlight dance across the coffee plants.

Maria Takes Charge
Maria skipped inside the house, her bare feet padding across the dirt floor, to find her youngest brother, Pedro, just awakened from his nap and crying in the hammock. She lifted him into her arms. "Mama," she called.