Lucelly works from the time Salomé gets up until she falls asleep. She does this from Monday to Sunday for two weeks in a row. "I'm a live-in worker. I get a day off every fortnight and with that free time I go to my sister's house in Cali, I catch up with my daughter and, when I can, I travel to La Sierra to see my family”. Lucelly is the mother and head of the family; her youngest son, Julián David, has lived in La Sierra since he was born, and her daughter Mishell also lived there until recently, before moving in with her aunt Consuelo in Cali to continue her studies.

Lucelly's parents, Cecilia Cruz and Marco Alirio Canchala, live and work in Los Robles. Their livelihood depends in large part on their food sovereignty: they grow many of the goods they consume such as corn, beans, bananas or cassava. The income they use to buy the rest of the things they need come mainly from growing coffee. Today, they are paid 80,000 pesos, or roughly €23 euros, for an "arroba" of coffee (twelve and a half kilograms): €1.80 per kilogram.

Marco Alirio explains that "workers are paid 300 pesos per kilo" –less than ten cents. It may not seem like much at all, and in a way it is one of the sacrifices involved in obtaining the end result: “If you start thinking about how much you spend to get a kilo of coffee, throughout the whole process, it's better to forget about it, because you know that you're doing it at a loss. But since there's no other option, you content yourself with what you can get. I owe my livelihood to coffee”, says the farmer.

In a shop in Barcelona, a kilogram of Colombian coffee costs €19, about ten times more than what Alirio and Cecilia make.

Indeed, having an arroba of coffee in the bag means having fertilized and weeded it for a year, harvested it, shelled it using a manual mill, cleaned it and dried it in the sun, and transported it to the village where it's bought and sold. "I don't think it's far," says Marco Alirio. "It's about 25 or 30 minutes on horseback”. Ultimately, this coffee ends up being enjoyed far from La Sierra. "They sell it elsewhere, it doesn't stay in Colombia", says the farmer. On the other side of the Atlantic, in a shop in Barcelona, a kilogram of Colombian coffee costs €19, about ten times more than what Alirio and Cecilia make. In addition to coffee, the Canchala Cruz family supplement their income through selling milk from a handful of cows they have, and the remittances sent by their daughters, each from a different city in the country. "They help us a lot", confesses Cecilia.

Lucelly, for example, sends a part of her salary to La Sierra every month. There, her parents and her sister Nohemi Canchala take care of Julián David. "He more or less lives in both houses because they are right next to each other", explains Lucelly, who says that her sister "helps me with my son more than she should". "She feeds him, she practically plays the role of a mother, something I can't do, she goes to school meetings, to medical appointments...” she recognizes, overcome by emotion. According to Lucelly, her sister “is blessed, because she hasn't had to go out and fight, to wrestle with a different life the way we've had to. My parents have also come to rely on her because she's there”.

In La Sierra, Nohemi is clear that "it would be very hard to leave my father and mother practically alone" and says that Julián David "is like another son to me, he is not a nephew but a son", just like Mishell, who "until she also left for Cali, was at home, slept here, ate here, got up to no good here, I've always had to take care of them”. Nohemi has not had to "go out and fight" in the city, but she fights every day to keep things going in the countryside, taking care of her parents, and often her little brother, her husband, her children, her sister's children, animals, the house, the orchard, and so on. "My husband has never been a selfish person" she ends up saying while, getting emotional as she goes on, she goes through the list of care tasks she carries on her shoulders.

According to Marco Alirio, in the countryside, "a woman's work is the hardest". "She is the first to get up and the last to go to bed", says Cecilia.

To continue with Lucelly's story, we might turn briefly to the inner workings of the global and local transfers of care charted by the Colombian researcher Camila Esguerra. Esguerra explains that, "in the countries of the so-called first world, there is a care deficit that has been met, not by national welfare state provision, but by the migration of women from southern countries”. She adds that, “when they migrate from their countries, there is a deficit of care in what we might term these donor countries", due in part to the entry of women into the workforce, as is the case of Dr. Maria Isabel, "which is in turn met by other women, be they migrants, nationals, or women from within the family. They do this with even less job security than migrant women from the global South, or even as unpaid care work”.

In this story, Cecília, Consuelo and Nohemi are the women who, out of love, make up for the care deficit that Lucelly inevitably leaves behind while she, taking care of Salomé, makes up for the deficit left by Dr. Maria Isabel Pava. As Esguerra goes on to explain, “it is a highly complex flow of relations” in which stock must be taken of "the stories of these migrant women, all the blood, sweat and tears behind the tales of migration and care work”: the hidden and underappreciated work of balancing emotions, feelings, bonds and distances taken on by these women.

The very possibility of living on, from and in harmony with the land is in danger of becoming extinct.

Esguerra stresses that these transfers must be seen as “a kind of conspiracy of racist, ableist, misogynist, colonial and ageist systems, which serves to bind migrant women to an urbanized and globalized care system which, it should go without saying, is to the detriment of all things rural”. Indeed, as we can see in the case of the Canchala family, what is in danger of disappearing is the possibility of living on, from, and in harmony with the land. That six of Cecilia and Marco Alirio's seven children have had to go to work in the cities represents an attack on their lifestyle and, ultimately, on their existence.

Leaving the countryside in La Sierra not only means distancing yourself from the family, but also saying goodbye to contact with nature, the closeness of the community, and the freedom the area provides. According to Lucelly, this is the main difference between the countryside and the city: freedom. "Here in Cali, you always have to be discreet about a lot of things, but there you go outside and you have no problems: you ride a horse, you go to the river... (...) in my vereda, everyone knows each other, but here you'd struggle to get a 'good morning' out of people. (...) There, if something happens to a family, everyone is ready to help, and for me that's the beauty, there's a real togetherness", Lucelly proudly declares. "The tradition of my land is very distinct”.

"Women in the countryside have no choice. You do the housework and you don't get paid, but the men go over to the neighbour's house to work.”

"I wish there were more things to do. Women in the countryside don't have much choice. You do the housework and you don't get paid, but the men go over to the neighbour's house to work", Lucelly Canchala complains. According to Esguerra, generally "women who do care work in the city are from rural backgrounds, many of them Black or indigenous”. It's worth mentioning that for some the experience brings a certain relief, allowing them to escape the violence of their family home, or take a step forward in terms of self-sufficiency: they go to the city to do the same tasks they did at home, but this time on a paid basis. For others, it is simply the path they are forced to go down due to the poverty in their local area.

In La Sierra, Julián David demands that those who live in the city “recognize that rural women are the ones providing sustenance, food, they're the ones who grow what's consumed in the city, and who take care of nature the way we take care of it here”. In Cali, Lucelly states emotionally: "I never forget where I'm from, I love my house, my vereda, my people”..

Ana Margarita Elias, Sofía's mother, casts her mind back as she sits on the porch of the house where she's caring for one of her grandchildren: the little one is unwell, and his grandmother caresses him as she talks. To get to the house where she worked as a domestic worker, Sofía "had to catch the bus here and get as far as Sonsonate. From there she'd take another to San Salvador, then a city bus. In the end, she left her job, everything she made went on paying for transport", she explains.

Sofia and her children, Carlos and Héctor, are also on the porch. The eldest practices classical guitar, until they convince him to join the conversation. He talks about Ana Margarita with all the shyness of teenager: “I don't call her granny, I call her mum because…". His sentence trails off as he glances at his mother, who is off-camera and off-mic.

“He's been raised here by us, since she [Sofía] left for work. That’s why he calls me mum”, confirms Ana Margarita. “He doesn't call me granny, he's called me mum since he was little. Because his father left when his mother was two months pregnant, she came here to live with us. He's [Carlos] thirteen years old, we've raised him”, says the grandmother. And so too Héctor, the younger brother, his stomach exposed as his grandmother continues to caress him while she recounts the family story.