Beating the Beans

Written by: Jannetta VandenBerg

November 2009

Location: The village of El Paraiso (Paradise), the Peten, Guatemala

Mission: Beat the beans!

Not one of the ten members of a Missionary Ventures Canada construction team from Community Christian Reformed Church of Richmond Hill really knew what was in store for them when they were asked to beat beans in late November 2009.

Arlen King, the MV Field Co-Coordinator for the Peten area of Guatemala, had asked us one evening, to consider helping the members of the local church community beat black beans. These beans would be sold as a fundraiser in support of the continued construction of their Christian school. In our typical North American way, we agreed that we would be more productive continuing our construction work at the school site rather than head out and beat beans. We politely declined the offer.

The next day dawned hot and sunny. The team was well into the construction work on the school when Arlen stopped us around 11 am and told us we would be going out to beat beans in support of our Guatemalan brothers and sisters.

We traveled to the harvest site by truck with some of the local women. They were bringing their men large pots of prepared chicken soup and corn tortillas for lunch. After a short drive across some rugged fields, the truck stopped in the middle of nowhere. It was still a half a kilometer walk through yet to be harvested corn fields, to a spot in a 10 acre weedy bean field where the men were literally beating dried black bean plants bunched on large tarps. Black beans and corn are staples in the Guatemalan diet. They stood and circled the bean plants and rhythmically took turns hitting bunches of bean plants with long strong sticks in order to release the black beans from the pods. Next, their rough hands sifted the beans and broken bits of the plants to separate the good beans from the rest of the plant debris on the tarp. Our job was to take over for the men while they took some time off for lunch.

We started to beat the plants while others went out into the field to gather more bean plants. It wasn’t long before our team was perspiring profusely; blisters began to appear on our hands and our arms began to ache with the constant pounding of the sticks under the scorching sun. This was no easy task. No one in the village had machinery to make the harvesting of the beans easier and more efficient! We kept this up for only an hour, scrambling for our water bottles and some shade when it was time for the men to return from their lunch break.

Our brief attempt at beating the beans was greatly appreciated by the local Guatemalan church community. In the meantime, we were humbled by the amount of hard physical labour needed by our Guatemalan brothers and sisters to harvest their black bean crop.

Throughout the rest of our stay in El Paraiso, we would often watch as the pastor weighed out beans for a villager who stopped by to purchase a bag of black beans. We knew that each bean sold would support the building of the school.

We came away from this experience with a much better sense of what it means to work together as a community.  No one on the team will ever be able to look at a can of beans on the grocery shelf without being reminded of the hard work required by a small village in an isolated area of Guatemala to produce and harvest black beans in order to build a Christian School. This school will share the love of Jesus and better the lives of the village children.

“The King will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.’ ” Matthew 25:40.