At the end of May, on a ranch in Valencia City, Bukidnon, I learned what years sound like. They sound like nothing. They sound like the half-second after an emcee says “first place” and before he says a name.
For a week, judges at the SEA Green Coffee Competition — the Philippines National Round — had tasted every coffee blind, knowing no farmer’s name. Now the names were all that was left, and everyone in the room had wagered years of their lives on what would fill the silence.
Boy Javier heard his first: first place, Liberica. Then Manolito “Lito” Garces of Pangantucan, called for second in Robusta; he turned to go back to his seat and was told to stay, because first was his too. Then Fu-Chun Lin — the Taiwanese farmer who found home in the Philippines, the one everyone calls Acuii — first place, Arabica, in the first competition he had ever entered.
I work in coffee, and I have known these three for years — cupped their lots, walked their farms, sat at their tables. So I knew what those silences contained.
Begin with what makes the silence heavy. A century ago, Philippine coffee sold across the world; then disease all but wiped it out, and the country never recovered.
