Hawaii Coffee Farms: A Taste of Paradise - How Kona roasts three million pounds of coffee annually.

[@alexcarter8807]

Spot! We meet again! This was linked in r/documentaries on Reddit. Back in the day, my older brother and a friend took the Seaflite (that's how long ago it was) to the Big Island to supposedly get jobs picking coffee. Well, the place wouldn't hire haoles so my brother was SOL. He had to pick beans as an independent for a week or two to make the money to take the Seaflite back to Oahu. We were not "fresh off the boat" all but my older sister had ages in the single digits when we moved to Hawaii but that's how it was. Maybe how it still is, not sure.

[@SpotGoesHawaii]

Small world Alex! A lot of the pickers there were on temporary work visas but some were from the mainland and just out in Hawaii for the season. Great story you have there. I am sure if you wanted to try your hand at picking coffee they would hire you.

[@alexcarter8807]

@@SpotGoesHawaii I just turned 62 and have zero interest in picking coffee for $3 an hour or whatever it works out to. When my older brother picked coffee, we were living on the windward side on Oahu, were on welfare, and if we just had browner skin would be considered local. But you know how it is in Hawaii. If I were to return to Hawaii to retire, I'd have social security, plus busking as I've developed fairly decent music skills, plus I'm *really* good at shell picking. But I've realized the mainland has spoiled me. I can walk down the street, go into any store or bank or the post office, and never get hassled. To cops, I'm invisible. I don't fear my neighbors. I have a few habits from growing up in Hawaii and being a young adult there, like my "head on a swivel" skills are very good and I can't kick the habit of, when leaving a store, holding the receipt in my hand so it's visible. In Hawaii, as a "haole", one is presumed to be a thief. To be frank, to be "haole" in Hawaii is to get much of the same treatment a Black person gets on the mainland. And I'm not eager to go back to it. One of my heroes, Louis Armstrong, left New Orleans and he didn't go back. He settled down, when he settled down, in a neighborhood in New York with a lot of artists and musicians etc. where he was treated the same as everyone else. Going back to Hawaii would be a big step backward for me.