A Story From Honduras

The travelers, the scholarship students, and the coffee farmers in Honduras

Written by Andrew Gaertner

2/5/2026

In January of 2026, I led a delegation of Farmer to Farmer members to visit coffee farmers in Honduras. After the delegation left, I stayed to distribute school supplies and scholarships to families. This year, we have a new 7th-grade student who didn’t go to school last year because she didn’t have a place to live in the city where the school is. We found her a place to live and got her enrolled in a nearby school. This is what solidarity looks like.  

Farmer To Farmer is a solidarity organization. We connect people in Wisconsin and Minnesota with people in Guatemala and Honduras. We have been doing this for over thirty years. Some of those connections are close ties that feel like family relationships. That means we are in. We have mutual responsibilities to each other. We feel each other's pain, and we feel each other’s joy.

The trips we take every year to Honduras and Guatemala are a chance to renew our connections. We meet with families, and we learn of births and deaths and graduations. We find out about how the growing season went, and we learn about the other ups and downs of the year. We take a personal interest in the lives of the people we are connected to.

In 2025, when we visited Don Arnulfo and Doña Adilia, it was a tale of woe. Doña Adilia had recently been in the back of a pick-up truck that had slid off an embankment and tumbled. She had broken bones and almost died. In the previous year, her daughter had died. And she was going blind with cataracts. Amidst all of this, her granddaughter, Stefani Yosary, graduated from 6th grade, without a chance of going to 7th grade in the city. 

This year, when we visited, Doña Adilia’s eyes were bright, and she gave us a warm smile. Her husband, Arnulfo, had been ready to pay thousands of dollars to get her cataract surgery when a Farmer to Farmer friend, Hector, helped him instead find an appointment with a free clinic. They did both of her eyes, and she can see again.