Chicagoan finds new life in coffee far from city
Just five years ago, one-time Chicagoan Stephanie Andersen-Samayoa didn't speak Spanish. She didn't know a thing about farming coffee in Central America, much less about the arduous task of removing the pits -- that is, the beans -- from the cherries of a coffee plant.
Then, in 2004, the phone rang.
(Richard A. Chapman/Sun-Times)
Her mother, a Salvadoran who moved to the United States when she was just 19, was back in Central America and visiting the family's abandoned coffee plantation, a casualty of the civil war that ended there in the early 1990s.
Andersen-Samayoa recalls their conversation: Someone in the family needed to reclaim the land -- once known for its coffee -- to clear what the jungle had taken and clean up the hacienda that had fallen into disrepair, its innards covered with bat poop.
At the time, she was a flight attendant working for a jet company that charged $10,000 an hour to fly some of the best known athletes and musicians around the globe.
"How do you say no to Mom?" Andersen-Samayoa wrote recently in an e-mail from El Salvador.
She took a leave of absence, followed by an extended leave. Finally, last year, she packed her things, putting much of it in storage, and moved to El Salvador.
"Learning a new language as an adult is no easy task, let alone a new culture," she says.
These days, the 50-year-old has taken up residence in the clean hacienda and is working on her cacao crops and pursuing organic certification.
She also is thinking about Chicago, where she raised a son. This week, her coffee hits shelves here -- the first of many stops.
Andersen-Samayoa is sending Bill Dugan, her ex-husband and the proprietor of the Fish Guy Market, 4423 N. Elston, about 700 pounds of coffee grown on her 300-acre estate, known as Finca Los Angeles.
The coffee is roasted in El Salvador and comes in medium and French varieties. It costs $9 a pound, or $38 for five pounds.
Andersen-Samayoa is moving beyond a broker who exports her coffee to Germany and Japan and shipping the product to Chicago herself. The hope is that she can take that money that would have gone to a go-between and give her workers, who earn $3.50 to $4 a day, a raise.
"They haven't had a raise in three years," she says.
But she doesn't think she'll be able to earn fair trade status that consumers are so focused on.
"I think the parameters of fair trade are that you give people land and you work as a cooperative effort. But it's not my place to do that. It's still my mother and her family's land, and I don't want to give away my great-grandfather's property," she says.
Andersen-Samayoa says she tries to go the extra mile, paying workers' health expenses and, for those who have children, picking up the tab for their school uniforms.
"I treat them as though they're my family and, you know, I think that means a lot to them," she says. "I've learned so much from them as well."