Near the coffee fields is a small, white house where three sisters-in-law and their families live. It’s a Friday afternoon and, since work and the day’s chores are done, they are relaxing with their husbands and kids. The young children run around, while the older ones play hide and seek. The women laugh and play the noisy game, tejo, while others get ready to play soccer. They show us the soccer field, which is about 100 meters away on a mountain slope that’s covered with coffee bushes and near a river.

During the week, Alicia, one of the sisters-in-law, and her husband, Pedro, rise at 6 a.m. After having breakfast with their children, a shower, and a cup of black coffee, they climb the nearby slopes to pick coffee. Alicia is drawn to the fields—they invigorate her. She has been picking coffee for about six years now. “During slow times, I pick fifty to sixty kilos,” she says. She works mainly with men; there aren’t many female coffee pickers, but they are respected and treated as equals: they work as much as the men.

At the end of each workday, Alicia returns home to her little Daniela who waits for her with open arms. In the evenings, she relaxes with Pedro and Daniela. They watch movies or soap operas, or just sit and enjoy the scenery. ”I sing, dance, anything that comes up, we go to the soccer games we do not have a team but we form one out on the patio. We make things up to remain active,” she says, smiling. Paula and Cristina, her sisters-in-law, do not pick coffee. They stay at home and maintain the household, watch the children, and prepare delicious, peasant meals every day for the whole family. On Mondays, they usually prepare rice and eggs for breakfast and sancocho (a dish often made with chicken or fish, potatoes, corn, and cilantro) for lunch.

Close to their house is a chicken coop filled with beautiful, fat hens that will probably be part of a dinner in the near future. The children run around, in between their mothers’ legs, not understanding why a couple of strangers with cameras and tape recorders are in their home. I can sense the settling of dusk and the official arrival of the weekend. The game of tejo continues, and I ask one of them to explain it: “I stand here and pick up a tejo [a four-inch, round metal disk that weighs a pound and a half], and I throw it to see if it ‘burns wick’ that is, if it reaches a target marked with gunpowder and detonates it. The winner is the player who detonates or burns the largest number of wicks.” My daughter and I stand and watch the game, and end up as absorbed in and excited about it as they are.

Pedro leaves the game and approaches us. He talks about how he arrived in the nearby city of Pereira eight years ago from an area halfway across the country. “No- body can make me leave now,” he says of these coffee lands. “What I like most is that I have a stable job; I don’t have to go from farm to farm. And we have fun playing tejo, listening to music, singing, and living in the country.”