In Honduran communities at high risk of disasters, a Red Cross project helps families strengthen resilience and increase income through enterprises such as coffee production.
The story of Moreno’s café begins in the heart of a coffee-growing family. Lourdes Amparo Paz and her family have always been dedicated to this business. In the early days, Lourdes sold her product at her son’s workplaces, where they had a small but loyal clientele. However, it was with the arrival of a Honduran Red Cross initiative to reduce the risks of climate change that the path of her business took a significant turn.
“They saw me constantly processing coffee and they liked how I had my business,” says Lourdes. “Then they told me that they were going to give me added value”.
With additional support of the Italian Red Cross, this project has already had a positive impact on communities in the department of Santa Barbara, a region in Honduras well known for its coffee production. Many families living in areas where disaster risks are constant have received support to diversify their livelihoods and increase their resilience in the face of such crises.
To help Lourdes step up her production and grow her business, the Red Cross provided her with some simple, but necessary equipment, such as a coffee roaster, a coffee grinder, a shelf for better storage and some trays.
Through collaboration with specialised engineers from the Honduran Coffee Institute, Lourdes and her family have acquired valuable knowledge to improve the quality of their coffee and to perfect their production.
In addition, Lourdes and her family have learned new ways to promote and sell their product. They now have a special package to make the brand they use, Moreno’s Coffee, more recognizable.
A big part of the success of Moreno’s Coffee is the service and attention to the diverse tastes of Lourdes’ customers. For example, she has diversified their offerings, incorporating special flavours such as pepper or cinnamon flavour.
“When a customer asks me, I serve them pepper or cinnamon flavoured coffee,” says Lourdes. “People like the coffee we produce because apart from having passion, we have love for what we do. And I think that’s very important.”
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This story was produced by Cristhel Madrid,
a talented storyteller from Honduran Red Cross.
It’s the stuff of science fiction: machines that make decisions about who and when to kill. Referred to as “autonomous weapons”, they’re already in use to some degree. But as more sophisticated systems are being developed we wanted to an expert in the field about whether such systems comply with international humanitarian law and what it means for humanity to give machines the power over human life and death.
In this episode, we talk with humanitarian communicator Kathy Mueller who produced our first magazine podcast series, The Wildfire Diaries, about massive wildfires in Northern Canada in 2017. We talk about that series, her many international missions, and the big changes in humanitarian communications since she began with the Canadian Red Cross almost 20 years ago.
In this episode, we talk about the power of storytelling to inform and inspire. “Storytelling is a fundamental aspect of human communication,” says our guest Prodip, a volunteer and multi-media storyteller for the Bangladesh Red Crescent. “It inspires us to be a hero of our own community.” We also speak with one such community hero, Dalal al-Taji, a longtime volunteer and advocate for inclusion of people with disabilities in emergencies response. “In disasters. persons with disabilities sometimes get forgotten.”
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