Day 11

Day 11:

Today we had three company visits on our agenda: Hela, Centauro’s, and Bosques de Mauco. It was an early morning and I fell asleep very quickly on the bus ride to our first company. We reached Hela, a company that makes paintbrushes, rollers, and some saws and similar equipment. Our guide spoke only in Spanish so we had one of the Chilean students translate for him. It was surprising how many of the products were made by hand. In the United States, machines and robots would be doing a bulk of the work, but here every worker had a specific job with a certain machine.

After that visit, we loaded up the bus again and headed to Centauro’s. This company produced canned food items, specializing in tomato paste. Again, our tour guide only spoke Spanish and we had the students translate. The smell of tomatoes and onions hit us immediately when we walked into the building and the first thing we did was receive hairnets. Of course, we all looked fabulous in them. The guide explained how the equipment worked, but since it was not tomato season, most of them were not being used. Aside from making tomato paste, the company also made canned fruit and some prepared meals. We saw some workers loading a machine with jalepeno peppers, which would be used for some of the prepared meals. The guide let us taste some of the tomato paste that was being cooked as well as some of the ketchup that was already packaged. I found it interesting that instead of packaging ketchup in plastic bottles, they put them in bags with a nozzle that pours the ketchup. Another interesting thing I learned was how dependent this company is on the weather. One of the executives explained to us that they were relying on rain this week to successfully produce their peach crop for the season.

Next stop was a lunch, and of course we all got empanadas (our favorite!). I’m not sure where we stopped but it was someone near the beach in what appeared to be a somewhat empty town. Our empanadas were ready pretty quickly and after lunch we headed to Bosques de Mauco, a mushroom farm. Once we stepped off the bus, you could smell the compost and it was not pleasant. They combined straw, horse manure, and chicken manure to create the compost and walking through this combination was not an enjoyable experience. We then went in to a few of the rooms where the mushrooms were growing, and we even saw them being picked. Our guide explained that it is necessary for the mushrooms to be picked by hand, but the labor costs were not that high because growing mushrooms is not very costly but is very profitable. Once we finished all the visits, I again took a nap on the bus. It was a very tiring day but I learned so much.