No Rest for the Weary or Jet-Lagged

Well I arrived in one piece a bit delirious but in one piece none the less. After 25 hours of being awake they let me sleep only to be put to work first thing Tuesday morning. Luckily it wasn't an incredibly labor intensive day, to be honest it was quite boring.
Here is an abbreviated version of what processing coffee is all about. After the coffee cherries are harvested they are pulped (separating the seed from the bean), you are then left with parchment (dried seeds covered with a stiff white skin), then the parchment is milled (removal of parchment skin and thin silverskin below), sized (using a table to separate beans into waste, peaberry, and normal sized green beans), and sorted.
Dragon's Lair not only grows coffee but we process and roast as well as provide that service for other small scale farmers here on the island. Yesterday I was put on sorting duty. Large scale operations sometimes have what is called a gravity table that will sort the beans for you. We do not so sorting is done by hand. We take large buckets of the green coffee after it has been milled and sort by hand the beans that may have defects. We looked for any beans that were split, or not whole, or black (called raisin), or a bean inside another bean (called motherbean). It was incredibly time consuming and a bit mind numbing and by the end of a 7 hour day we only had one and a half, five gallon buckets to show for it.

Now after our days work was complete we headed out to 2 step which boasts the best snorkeling on the island. What I haven't mentioned to you yet is how unbelievably beautiful it is here. It is like the whole world is grey in comparison to the vibrant color here. Almost as though I am seeing color for the first time. Once I overcame my apprehension to enter an underwater universe I was amazed. There was a lot of traffic down there. So many fish I couldn't possibly name and the reef like a village of strange shapes and colors. A sea turtle floated right to me and for a second I thought it might shake my hand. I decided I was finished however, when a man swam by me with a speared fish. A little to close carrying a sharp object for my taste. I figured it was best to get out before I was next.

I then returned to the farm to witness my first Hawaiian sunset. From the lanai (porch) I could see the ocean and the sun setting, as well as, papaya, hibiscus, banana, mangoe, coffee, pomegranate, orange, lemon, mac nuts, some flowering hallucinogenic, avocado, plumeria, and lots of chickens.
I could get used to this!