Before the sun rises, another day begins with the soft scratching sound of a wattled brush turkey. I sit on the floor of a thatched kitchen hut to prepare my morning coffee with women from a farming village on the northern coast of Papua New Guinea.
I watch as a female coffee farmer laughs and chats to her sister. Their workdays blend into one endless shift. Her hands are rough from working dawn to dusk, picking, carrying, pulping, fermenting, sorting, washing, and drying coffee. When she’s not in the fields she cooks, gathers firewood, and looks after her children and subsistence crops on a daily basis. Without rest, this woman sees the world through the sweat of her labour.
I watch her pick coffee cherries from her small garden of…
