The offices at Nuestra Senora de los Andes are prayed antiphonally, each of two sides taking turns. The monks sit on benches with slanted lecterns in front of them. I sat on a bench between Lorenzo (the postulant) and Raul (from Chile). Behind us was Juan Diego (the busy cellarer who had many tasks that kept him in Merida). On the other side sat FM, Dom Placido and Br. Tomas, with Sister Ester on the bench behind.
Because I know the psalms, I was easily able to comprehend the Spanish. I did not feel left out at all, but was able to join in with the fluid chant.
After Terce on Wednesday (the feast of John of the Cross), I was assigned work in the coffee business. I walked down the mountain with Lorenzo and Raul. At a fork in the road, Raul took me to the left, while Lorenzo proceeded on down the road to packing. Raul led me to a large cement slab between two buildings.
The buildings are arranged on a slope where a road winds around them along the mountain. A truck is able to stop beside the second floor of a building, unload coffee from the field. The conchas are removed with a machine on the second floor and the granos are then dropped down to the first floor. Here they are placed in wheel barrows or in piles just in front of the building.
The cement slab in front of this building is for drying the granos in the sun. This was my work for the day. Raul dumped barrows full of beans on the slab. He showed me how to use a large wooden rake to spread the beans, moving in ever widening circles. I had to remove my boots in order to walk over the beans. The beans were white.
We had about six or seven piles of beans to work. Every 20 minutes or so, we would rake through them again. The rakes are heavy. The beans resistant. It is hard work. During the breaks, Raul asked me questions about Conyers; I asked him about his home monastery. He was tolerant of my meager Spanish.
Mid-morning, we walked down the slope to the torrefaccion building where they roast, grind, and pack the beans. (Fr. TF from Conyers has stayed to help out on several occasions. He has trouble saying torrefaccion (roasting) and calls this building Torre-Londres (Tower of London). Lorenzo told me this, laughing.)We had some coffee with sugar. I watched Lorenzo and Pedro package some beans. Then, Raul and I headed back up to our work.
The packed coffee is sent to various places. It is rumored that President Chavez drinks coffee from Los Andes. However, the rules he has put in place do not make it easy to export coffee. The shipment we need in Conyers for Christmas mail orders is still sitting in a warehouse in Venezuela, even though all the paper work has been completed and approved.
Off to the side of the cement slab, just over the edge of the slope, a bird (a kite, I think) hovered in mid-air, held up on an up-draft.
About 11:00, we had to scoop back up all the beans and put them back into wheelbarrows to dump them against the building again. I scooped and bent and emptied and pushed and dumped the wheelbarrow and returned to scoop and dump and empty again and again.
When work was finished, I was tired. So, the walk back to the monastery UP HILL was an added humiliation.
After Sext we had lunch of rice and black beans. The sweet fruit, lechosa, grows all around on small trees. The fruit is large and looks inside and out like a mango. Its flavor is reminiscent of a mango. The monks are listening to a biography of Simon Bolivar.
After a meal, all the monks gather in the kitchen to wash and rinse dishes. On each side of a wide counter are two sinks. Two monks wash, two rinse. I was one who rinsed each day.
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