Meet Jeidy, a coffee farmer and budding rural leader

October 1, 2018
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Meet Jeidy, an incredible coffee grower.

Jeidy and her proud father in a community coffee solar drier where Jeidy dries the high quality coffee she grows. (Photo: Beatriz Oliver/SeedChange)

In your late teens, the future can feel uncertain at the best of times. It’s a time of transition and searching for what’s next.

For Jeidy Marilú Domínguez Morales, the future felt far from home and family, in a city well outside her village in Intibucá, Honduras.

“I had plans to leave for Spain,” she says. “I wanted a better life.”

As a young woman, there weren’t many job opportunities or avenues for education available to her in her hometown. That is, until she met Victoria Aguirres, leader of the local rural women’s farming group that SeedChange supports. That’s when she found both.

Victoria is helping to lead the way in sustainably-grown, high quality coffee. She even won the the 2018 coffee tasting competition in Intibucá, Honduras. It was a proud moment for her but even more so for the young women like Jeidy who she mentors. Victoria’s mentorship showed Jeidy how farming could be her opportunity to learn valuable new skills and use them to earn a living. The best part: she could do it all in her own hometown.

Victoria Aguirre (third from the left) wins the coffee tasting competition which was partially judged by Tracey Clark (fourth from the left), the president and CEO of Bridgehead coffee shops in Ottawa, Canada. (Photo: Beatriz Oliver/SeedChange)

Jeidy dove into the training that your support makes possible. She learned about sustainable farming and shade-grown coffee. Inspired, she asked her father, José Domínguez, for a slice of land where she could put her new farming expertise into practice. But she had one more request: that the land title be under her name.

And he said yes, making Jeidy one of a small number of women who hold title to land in Honduras.

Jeidy and her coffee. (Photo: Beatriz Oliver/SeedChange)

Today, Jeidy is 23 years old and proud of her burgeoning enterprise. She grows diverse vegetables, fruit trees, and high quality coffee. Through the women’s farming group that you support, she sells her coffee direct to buyers, skipping the middleman and fetching a better, fairer price.

“We don’t have to leave the community,” says Jeidy, who is already planning the future of her coffee business – a future rooted in Honduras. “It’s not overnight that you’ll achieve the results you want, but now I’m sure they can be achieved.”