Header Photo: Fero's board of directors in their office, Sidama, Ethiopia
In a dimly lit room with low ceilings and sparse furnishings, I sit in a plastic chair against a wall. In the four chairs to my right are colleagues from my work in coffee, folks who own or work for organizations focused on the task of getting organic, fairly traded coffee into the hands of consumers near and far. They’re friends of mine, too, in addition to professional acquaintances—some of us have traveled together before on trips like this, trekking across continents to meet with coffee producers whose crop has landed in our roasteries and cafes and cups for the past ten years or more.
Left: Jennifer embraces Miret Bua
Directly across from me are two women. Their hands are folded in their laps; their colorful skirts only tempting to contradict their stern expressions. I’m not sure how to read them. On each side of them sits a man, more casual than these women, legs splayed, relaxed. They are comfortable here. The women, it seems, are less so. We learn later that they are the newest members of the Fero cooperative’s leadership council.
We’ve come here to Fero’s administrative office—a basic room with one desk, papers neatly piled in the corner, a few shelves and informational posters on the walls—in the coffee farming region of Sidama, Ethiopia, to meet with the board of directors and get an update on how things are going here. What has their production been like this year; how were the yields? What are the biggest challenges facing their organization? Felipe, who works as Sourcing Manager for our importer Cooperative Coffees, runs the litany of questions he’s been reciting at each coop we’ve visited over the last three days and diligently records the responses. Maybe it’s evident that we’re all a little spent, even though we are all so honored to be here. We do our best to stay engaged, even as we wonder if our translator is capturing the nuances of our questions and the answers we’re getting.
Gazing straight across the room at the two women, my mind wanders. What’s going through the minds of each of these farmers, who labor tirelessly in their commitment to producing high quality coffee that will command a fair price in the specialty market? Are they as curious about us as I am about them, their daily lives and patterns, their hopes and dreams?
While the economy is growing, Ethiopia is poor. The literacy rate is 52%. The average monthly income hovers around $55. Over 20 million people have been displaced in the past five years due to civil conflict. Folks here are focused on getting their daily needs met, protecting their families, and staying fed. And yet Ethiopian farmers produce some of the world’s highest-quality coffees, prized for their complexity and distinctive profiles. The disparity between the economic status of these farmers and that of most of the people who drink their coffees could not be more stark.
Jennifer in the Learning Lab, doing a brewing demo
I am, obviously, one of those people. I fuss and measure and inspect and pour and sip, taking great pains to craft a well-brewed cup from the beans planted, tended, harvested, fermented, milled and exported by the fine coffee experts sitting across from me. I also have approximately twenty pairs of shoes and high speed internet in my home and a car and several bikes and no fewer than eight different coffee brewing devices in my possession, all things I am relatively certain these folks do not possess. So when Felipe wraps up the list of questions with “Do you have any questions for us?” and we only receive pleasantly blank stares, no questions, not even one, I am at first puzzled but later, after much reflection, I get it.
There is no context for curiosity here. When your primary motivation each day is to get up and simply do the work so that you can get paid, even if it is a dollar or two each day, so that you can feed your children and maybe send them off to school if they are lucky, you do not have the luxury of curiosity about the strangers from a foreign country who show up at your workplace to ask questions about how the coffee is doing this year.
Fero's board of directors with Cooperative Coffees colleagues
Every time we asked a group of farmers what else we could do to support them, they said, essentially, “buy more coffee.” They simply need us to keep them in business; they need us to pay as much as we can possibly pay so that maybe they can rest a little easier at night, confident that their hard work will find fruition in a paycheck (or more likely, cash in their pocket).
So at the end of our meeting, in the awkward space of waiting to see if anyone has anything to add, I speak up. I don’t know exactly how to say it, but I suddenly feel that I need to try my best to express exactly how grateful I am to be here, how meaningful it is to spend time with them, how humbled I am by their work. Stumbling over my words, my eyes feeling watery, I say something like “We love your coffee so much. It is incredible to be here with you; your coffee is important to us. Thank you.” I have no idea if, through the layers of linguistic translation, my heartfelt sentiments are fully understood. Maybe they just think I’m that crazy American lady who’s getting a little emotional at the end of the meeting. But I have to try.
Right: Presenting a Higher Grounds t-shirt to Miret Bua
We take a short walk, out of the office and across the road, to a small plot of coffee trees. It turns out to be the farm of Miret Bua, one of the women on the board of directors who sat so stoically across from me at the meeting. I have a Higher Grounds t-shirt with me, the last item in my stash of swag I’ve been doling out on this trip. It has a silhouette of a view in Traverse City, the top of Wayne Hill looking over Grand Traverse Bay, a piece of my home now carried to hers. I hold it up and present it to Miret, a small token of my appreciation. Her stern face breaks into a wide smile. Immediately she pulls the shirt over her dress. She pulls me into a hug. She doesn’t have a question. But she has an answer.