La Plata Interview Series: My Conversation with Doña Nelly
- Mason Maurer
- 2 minutes ago
- 5 min read
A little over a month ago, I had the privilege of interviewing Doña Nelly, a highly respected founder of an all-women’s coffee growing association called Las Rosas in La Plata, Colombia. The ride over to her house from the hotel took a little over ten minutes, and the truck we were in weaved seamlessly through dozens of motorbikes as we made our way through town. Eventually, we pulled off onto a dirt road and entered the property. As we made our way to the door, we were emphatically greeted by Nelly’s son, Felipe, and his son Samuel. The house was wide, with its walls made out of brick and the roof out of slanted sheet metal. It was about dusk, and the view of town on top of the hill the house sat on was phenomenal. Walking into the house, I met Doña Nelly for the first time. After all I had read and heard about Nelly, I pictured a stone-faced, no nonsense woman with a tough demeanor. I was pleasantly surprised. Doña Nelly was 5’0” at most, and greeted me with a warm smile and a cup of coffee. She seemed to be in her late sixties. We sat down and began to talk. First, Doña Nelly explained the need for such an organization in the community.
“Why the need to form an association? Because, you know, here in our country, Colombia, rural women are often very marginalized. It's work, raising children, taking care of the household, all the work, but that work had never been recognized. So, that's where the need arises. But first, we had some very important training sessions. These sessions were about learning to love and value myself as a woman, so that later we could empower ourselves and all the other women in our families. We wanted the husbands and children to be part of the training sessions because it's very important for them to also shed that mindset that only the man is in charge and only he does things right. So, that has been our great success, the association, the women, because we have been working and doing all the work from within the family, right? We work a lot on gender equity, generational bridging. Because, well, the countryside is aging. We're getting old. So, we need our children to study, but also to love the countryside because the best business is in agriculture.”
She then elaborated on the gender dynamics in the area. Often, the women have little to no say in family decisions. There is a culture of machismo among the men that seeks to limit their influence in such matters. As a response, Nelly created Las Rosas to empower women. While the lessons were good, the group was also searching for something else: financial independence. However, it was hard to find land. Men were reluctant to sell to them. It was a process, but eventually, Las Rosas got a plot that was large enough for 2,000 trees.
“Then, the maintenance of the coffee,” Doña Nelly continued. “You have to feed the coffee. Thank God an angel appeared to us. It was Dr. Saúl San Miguel, the manager of the cooperative in the area. This farm where we are is part of the cooperative, which is the departmental coffee growers' cooperative. That man believed in the group of women; we started with 50 women and grew to be three hundred. He believed in us. And he gave the authority to Dr. Gladiandi Hernández, who is the director of the western region of the cooperative, to grant us credit even though we were not members of the cooperative. We had nothing, but she provided us with the credit for the fertilizers we needed to cultivate those 2,000 coffee trees.” From there, the group harvested the crops and looked for export options. Through the cooperative, they were put in touch with a company in Canada called Responsible Green Coffee. They cut a deal and began exporting there. The cooperative helped with logistics. Since then, the group has kept expanding. Known in the area by their trademark pink vests, the women of Las Rosas have grown from a few dozen to hundreds. Over the years, they have increased their emphasis on education. “I finished high school at 50 years old within our organization. There are also women who are now engineers. They already hold positions, for example, in the cooperative, in the cooperative council. We have a councilwoman in the municipal council from the association, and many hold positions from there. From being the president of the community action board to holding important positions in offices. All of that helps one to keep learning how to lead. Now it's our turn to teach the young people as well, so they can learn the same work that we've been doing here.” Now, many women in the area run the finances of their family’s farms. Due to their unique positions, the women of Las Rosas are often more educated than their husbands. They are more willing to try out new strains of coffee and new irrigation techniques. “While the men are suspicious at first, they see their yield increasing and eventually give in,” Nelly chuckled. Doña Nelly then switched the conversation towards the future. She told me a story about how one of the daughters of a Las Rosas member kept drawing pictures of herself in a pink vest. “Many of the young girls around here want to be a part of it,” said Nelly, a smile beginning to creep onto her face. “They keep telling me, "I want to be a rose too!"” Contrary to other people I talked to on my trip, Doña Nelly is not in favor of youth leaving for the city in search of a better life. She is in support of education, but hopes that many will return to help out their families and those in poverty. “Coffee is in our veins. We got used to living on dirt floors, with wooden doors, bamboo. Eh. And that's not how it should be. That's not how it should be.” One thing that scares her about the future, though, is climate change. “We are experiencing it. We have been affected when there is too much sun, at least at the beginning of the year. It was a lot of summer, a lot, a lot of summer. So the coffee plants dry up, the crops dry up, and now we're experiencing a winter season where the roads have been damaged. There have been landslides in the crops. It also affects the quality of the coffee if it rains a lot, because the coffee starts to fall. The unripe coffee falls and doesn't get a chance to fully develop. There won't be any flowering either. If it rains a lot, there won't be any flowering for the next harvests. All of that affects us. At least now, drying the coffee has also been very difficult. And we fell short in terms of drying facilities because we didn't have anywhere to put the coffee to dry it. That's why most of it had to be sold as wet coffee, or green, as we call it. We had to sell it. The climate changes have affected us quite a bit. Unripe coffee sells for far less.”
This was where our conversation ended, as Doña Nelly needed to cook dinner. Overall, this conversation was the most insightful I had on the trip. Nelly’s kindness and perseverance shined through during our discussion, and she had an immense gratitude for those around her. Everyone I spoke to about her, whether they were family or otherwise, assumed a tone of reverence when she was brought up. She is truly a leader in her community.