Paying it forward...

One of the things I love about the international specialty coffee community is the general spirit of selflessness. That may sound contrived, but there’s really no other way to put it. Let me explain.

When Poul and Chad were in Costa Rica this past spring, they visited a fantastic little coffee farm called Café Sin Limites. They got to know the farmer, Jamie Cárdenas Rojas and were quite surprised and impressed with his dedication to quality. The quality of the operation, and the quality of the coffee impressed us enough to buy it and roast it both as a drip and an espresso. It’s also the coffee Chad has chosen to use for competition this year.

While Poul and Chad were in Costa Rica, some very bad weather hit and one of the structures that Jamie uses to dry coffee just blew away in the wind.

This moved our roaster, Chad to do something to try to help Jamie out. So we held a little benefit here at Transcend in conjunction with Slow Food Edmonton to raise some money to help replace the structure. The story up to this point is already old news, and probably best understood by watching the video we made about it.

But here’s the update:

We thought we were doing something nice, something to benefit a hard working coffee farmer that would be hard pressed to replace an entire drying structure on his own. But Jamie was about to surprise us once again.

It turns out that when Jamie received the funds for the drying structure, he decided to donate it to Children’s daycare (Hogar Comunitario in Los Guido community, Desamparados, San Jose) for kids who have been abused or mistreated.

[caption id="attachment_933" align="alignnone" width="512" caption="Jamie and his wife Maribel handing out gifts. Christmas came early for these kids."][/caption]

It’s this attitude of taking care of those around you, paying forward, investing in local communities and generosity that continues to surprise and inspire us.

Keep up the great work Jamie and Maribel!