A Long Way Home (To Coffee)
Being abroad during your third natural disaster is hard, but makes coming home very exciting.
Part 1 of a series on our autonomous coffee harvesting venture.
I got married in January of 2020, in Puerto Rico, two days after an earthquake hit the original site where we planned to have our wedding. Our guest list was small and intimate already, and we quickly shifted venues, found places for guests whose AirBnBs cancelled, found some grocery store caterers who were still willing to make us some food, and held the wedding anyway.
It was beautiful. My brother officiated and we got married in the sunset on the beach. His tsunami safety routine before the ceremony was a hit. Our reception was friendly and fun, but we were also exhausted and ready to return home. My husband would go back to grad school and I would return to my freelance job online, and we’d have a nice, long nap for a honeymoon. I said goodbye to my parents (and earthquake rattled dog) and took off, assuming I’d be back to visit in May.
And then some things happened in March. You know the things.
In some odd ways, the pandemic put me on a better track than I’d been on the year prior. Being alone in a country neither my husband nor I grew up in, in lockdown, I finally gave myself some room to admit how much I was struggling with in terms of mental health. Up until about April of 2020, I’d been doing the mental equivalent of hiking with a broken leg since April of 2018, and March of 2020 was the mental equivalent of that leg finally falling off.
Following that, starting in April, I decided to pick myself back up and get back to it (but a lot smarter). I worked out a routine so helpful I ended up writing an article about how to be productive when you’re exhausted. I finally buckled up, found out how to be patient with myself and still do things, and started pushing forward our family business venture that had been stalled since 2017 after Hurricane Maria tore the roof off our house.
On the other hand, it ended up being a year and a half before I could see my family again.
A Year and a Half
As previously mentioned, I had tickets to see my family in May. While my husband studied in Europe, I was working for my father already, trying to support our existing business, and I like to be home often. I used to fly with my family all the time — we’re a multicultural family that does a lot of bouncing around — but sometime in my 20s when traveling alone for the first time, I started getting an intense fear of getting sick on an airplane and not knowing what to do.
As terrible as it was, I had to tell my family there was no precaution I could take that wouldn’t leave me in abject terror for the whole flight. I wouldn’t be able to go home, not even with a mask, not even if we scraped together our savings to give me a “social distancing” extra seat. Even if I could somehow tamp down the fear of getting sick myself, much of my family is at-risk and I couldn’t stomach the thought of taking the virus home with me.
We had to cancel my flight.
It was difficult. I was extremely lonely. I didn’t know many people back in Europe where we were living, and those who I did and trusted to take precautions were students who moved back home to their own families. The only person I saw for most of our time in lockdown was my husband.
During the first spring, I decided to be home in spirit by picking back up a venture we’d begun before Maria — automated coffee harvesting and land tending. When my family had started exploring the option, I was starting my masters in medical physics. After that, it seemed like it was disaster after disaster setting us back.
Coronavirus was the last disaster-straw. I was trained in imaging and trapped away from my family. In the summer I decided that at the very least, I would get the coffee harvester working for them.
By the fall, we started to make progress on our computer vision process again, and the wait continued for when I’d be able to get home and work on our prototype hardware.
Still, the winter wasn’t bad. I would go on long walks and take my family on a video call with me. We lived further out of town, so I had a lot of room to wander.
I took a lot of spooky photos.
By the second pandemic spring, Americans were getting vaccinated, and I didn’t even have an estimate on how long it would take for me to get vaccinated (and more importantly, home).
Though Europe was ahead of most of the world in vaccination, in comparison to many of my American friends (and my family), vaccination was slow. Gruelingly slow. My heart goes out to people who still cannot access the vaccine, because at times I felt like I couldn’t stand to see one more argument about whether to get the vaccine when I was still waiting to see when I could even see my family.
We ended up chancing July tickets. I hoped I could get the vaccine in June at the latest, somehow, and as long as my family was vaccinated, I was ready to risk it with a good mask and testing policies on airplanes.
One week after my second vaccine, I got my negative Covid-19 test and traveled home.
Hang on, back up, coffeebots?
Meet Larry and Lara. Despite promising efforts to give them brains and eyes, they’re still a work in progress. Hopefully we’ll get them into the field soon now that I’m back in the field.
Our family business is software and translation, but around 2016 we became interested in the agricultural crisis Puerto Rico is facing when it comes to coffee production. We started looking into affordable harvester automation that could stay community run and offset the labor shortage while keeping the profits in the Puerto Rican economy.
Then we were hit by a hurricane, which set us back. Now, despite a rocky year and a half, we’re finally getting back to it.
Which is why I’m writing this article: now that I’m finally home (and had a full month to recover from the impact of suddenly being able to see people again) and can take pictures to my heart’s content, I plan to do an entire series of articles on how and why we chose coffee and where to send it.
