Documentary: Birdsong & Coffee: A Wake Up Call

As an alternative way to present valuable information other than just listening to lectures, the ESLP program showed the film "BirdSong & Coffee: A Wake Up Call" by Anne Macksoud and John Ankele. This documentary addressed several different topics, the main one being fair trade coffee in Southern Costa Rica (as well as everywhere else!) as a goal for communities, environments, and the coffee workers to live in a sustainable harmony. The film brought the audience inside a beautiful coffee farm where many interviews of workers, exchange students, scientists, and environmentalists were done about life in the coffee trade and it's necessary evolvement. It connects the everyday consumership of coffee in the United States with local Costa Rican farms who are directly effected by what Seth Petchers of Oxfam explains as a "humanistic catastrophe." Here audience members learned the importance of fair trade coffee through a farm workers perspective and gained resources as to how to support such a cause.