The most special person I have met recently is Marilyn Monroe. That’s her name as she said it, and she didn’t explain why. She was pretty much the opposite in every way of the Marilyn Monroe of the silver screen.
Marilyn was a five-year old Latina niña when she started picking coffee on the finca where her mother worked and lived in the volcanic mountains near Boquete, Panama. As she grew, her employer, the farmer, saw her potential and paid for her school, including university. Marilyn went on to get a law degree, married another lawyer, moved to Panama City, and had a little girl. When her husband died at a young age, Señora Monroe and her daughter, Lorraine, discovered he had purchased a coffee finca near where she had grown up. Leaving her law practice, Marilyn followed Lorraine and her son-in-law back to the mountains.
Marilyn and Lorraine were passionate about growing organic coffee, more to be a model for other farmers than as a commercial producer. And Marilyn was even more passionate about giving opportunities to the thousands of indigenous Ngäbe people whose labor made coffee farming possible in the region. Marilyn was very excited that it was the role of the Ngäbe in coffee production that I was most interested in hearing about. I thought she was going to hug me.
Panama has the second highest per capita income in Latin America but severe income inequality, with skyscrapers in Panama City looming over slums. In the mountains and along the remote Caribbean coast, over 90% of the Ngäbe live in extreme poverty, and 1/3 are illiterate.
Very close to the beautiful two-night rental my wife and I had found above Boquete was a large coffee finca. Below this farm was a dingy, shabby migrant camp of shacks surrounded by a high, plastic-shrouded fence topped with barbed wire. Outside the gate to the camp, unsupervised boys crawled through a dirty drainage pipe as their playground. A barefoot girl in a traditional Ngäbe dress passed by inside.
It was February and still the middle of coffee picking season.
