I love drinking coffee, I am a caffeine addict. I have been a coffee drinker since I was a few years old since my mother used to give my siblings and me a glass of coffee with milk every morning, this as breakfast to go to school.

I don't know where she learned that a glass of coffee with milk was enough breakfast to keep us satisfied for 6 hours away from home, the truth is that I remember being very hungry when I got home. She would then give each of us a quarter to spend for my three brothers and me and then at recess I could either buy a soft drink to quench my thirst and stay hungry or buy some sweet bread and stay thirsty for the rest of the morning.

That was my indesition in all the recesses of my memories and this was the case during my 6 years of school. I didn't understand why they gave us so little money. We had so little breakfast and so little communication.

I would just do what she told me without asking. Asking her meant that I was disrespecting and then came the much dreaded and traumatizing punishment.

So it was that I got used to not giving up coffee with milk every morning in my time as a schoolgirl. When it was time for me to become a teenager, I started drinking coffee with sugar only, since I was a chubby girl by this time, I learned to drink my coffee without sugar and even after so many years in my 60's I still drink it without sugar.

But this is not the story I want to tell. I used to drink coffee but I didn't know about the coffee plant until I was a university student.

So when I was studying in a city in the Andes Mountains of my country, on one of those occasions when there were student disagreements with the university authorities, one of the many fights broke out to the point that classes were suspended for an indefinite period of time. After 6 days had passed and classes did not start, my classmates who lived in nearby towns went home.

Then someone invited me to go to his father's farm and we went there. This was during the time of the coffee harvest, they needed workers to pick coffee and my friends and I decided to go and put ourselves on the order. They explained to me how to dress and my odyssey in the land of Andean coffee began.

I’d like to let you know that Venezuela is one of the best coffee producers in the world, it’s apparently recognized as such internationally. I just had to ask the owners what to do and the rest was on my own.

You put on boots to climb the slope of the mountain where this coffee grows at an incline. At waist-level, a kind of basket is placed, tied on the back, and it’s there where the coffee that we collect with both hands is deposited.

The red and yellow colored coffee should be collected, the green coffee should not be picked because in this case the coffee is not of high quality because it’s unripe. When the basket is full, it’s taken to the place where there is a larger basket and where we all collect the same coffee, but separated from other groups because in the end we would be paid for our collection.

The plants are not very tall but leafy and they are next to each other, very close. So you pick the coffee from all the branches on one side and then go behind to the other row of plantAs you have to pick the fruits very quickly, you have to be careful not to pick the green ones and that's how fingernails get totally mangled.

After collecting a large basket of these coffee fruits, they are placed in a machine that removes all the husk from the coffee and the seed goes to another place where it’s collected. These seeds are placed in the sun, every day they have to go to a patio where the seeds are placed in the sun and are moved several times. This process takes a few days until the coffee is dry from exposure to the sun.

It’s then collected and sent to a place where all the bags of coffee arrive. Here it receives the name of "Paca". There the beans are selected, weighed and purchased. If it’s a good quality coffee, well dried and well selected, they pay a good price for it.

There they then select from all the sacks which is the first grade coffee for export and which is the second and third grade.

And when we were ready to start the whole process of collecting coffee again, they told us that classes would resume again. So our odyssey with coffee came to an end and we had to go back to the university.

This is how, after more than 20 years of drinking coffee, I had my first encounter with the plant and with coffee beans and it was a wonderful experience that I’ll never forget.

I'm @gertu from Venezuela.