by Dave Eggers
—
The day after Mokhtar arrived in Yemen, Mokhtar and Nurideen went to Haymah. At the gas station called Abu Askr, they took the usual right and descended into the valley.
At the al-Amal Cooperative, Mokhtar got out of the truck and greeted all the farmers he knew. There were songs and handshakes and hugs, but Mokhtar was looking for Malik, the man he’d seen under the tree. He found him in a communal house, sitting with three other men. Mokhtar bent down and held Malik’s head in his hands, and kissed him on the forehead.
“Your coffee is the best in the world,” Mokhtar said.
Malik nodded. He said nothing.
“Thank you,” Mokhtar said, and, given Malik’s reticence, he felt the need to elaborate. He told Malik that he had brought his coffee all the way to San Francisco. That they’d cleaned it, sorted it, roasted it and cupped it, and that it had scored as high as any Yemeni coffee ever had.
Malik smiled and nodded.
“Thank you,” Mokhtar said again, and told Malik that he would be buying all Malik’s coffee from now on, at a price five times what he’d been paid before; that Malik’s way of cultivation and picking would be the model for everyone in the collective; that together they would transform the Haymah Valley and, eventually, all the coffee of Yemen.
Malik nodded and smiled.
Mokhtar put his hand meaningfully on Malik’s shoulder, and walked away. He almost laughed. Either Malik was a preternaturally stoic and unemotional man, or he had expected this news. Maybe, for him, just a confirmation of the obvious.
Mokhtar spent the day at the cooperative. He walked the farms. He talked about pruning and about the next harvest. He told the farmers about his Q grader status. They followed him through the trees, up and down the terraces, and, buoyed by the news of Malik’s coffee, news that had quickly spread throughout the cooperative, they felt that Mokhtar might actually bring change.
No offense, they intimated in various ways throughout the day, but when he had first arrived, in his American clothes and unable to tell a coffee plant from an olive tree, they had been skeptical.
—
Mokhtar had never been to Ethiopia. He and everyone traveling the region had been through the Addis Ababa airport, but he’d never been beyond the city. The trip was the idea of the Small Microeconomic Promotion Service—SMEPS, an NGO with funding from the World Bank that sought to improve economic opportunities for small businesses throughout Yemen. The plan was to bring sixteen small coffee farmers from Yemen to visit successful farms in Ethiopia. Maybe they could take away inspiration and best practices. Mokhtar knew Abdo Alghazali, one of the directors of SMEPS, who invited him along. They flew to Addis Ababa, a brief flight over the Red Sea, on October 31, 2015.
For most of the Yemeni farmers, it was their first time out of the country, and certainly their first time in Ethiopia. A region near Harar had been chosen as a prime opportunity to see how specialty coffee was grown, harvested and processed on a large scale. From Addis Ababa, the drive to Harar was eight hours and cut through countless small towns. The views were magnificent—Ethiopia was green, everything along the way was green. Ethiopia, like Yemen, was a country plagued by misperceptions from the rest of the world. When the West thought of Ethiopia, they thought of poverty and famine, emaciated babies dying in the desert. But the Ethiopia Mokhtar saw was a bustling East African nation of cities and farms and lakes, with a large and educated middle class, a feisty press and, in Addis Ababa, a capital city that rivaled Nairobi and Johannesburg.
But they were not staying in Addis. They were passing through, on their way to Harar, the birthplace of coffee. It was in the hills of Harar that the mythical shepherd Khaldi had first noticed a sleepless spring in the steps of his goats, and had sampled the coffee cherries he’d seen them eating. There was still coffee grown in this region of Ethiopia, the Yirgacheffe, in vast hillside farms blessed by ample seasonal rain.
Harar, though, was something unique. An ancient city, home to some of the country’s oldest mosques, a city almost untouched by modern architecture. In all of Ethiopia it was the most Yemeni city, a place where Arab traders had been coming for a thousand years and where they still exerted great cultural influence. Harar was also the adopted home of Arthur Rimbaud. The young French poet, who became a central influence for the Surrealists, exiled himself in a ramshackle home high above the city. A drug addict and sometime gunrunner, he was also, for a short period, a coffee trader. He died in France in 1891, at the age of thirty-seven, while planning his return to Africa.
—
The Ethiopian way of making specialty coffee was a revelation. Now the methods and standards Mokhtar had been preaching to the Yemeni farmers could be seen in practice. If they hadn’t believed him before when he showed them pictures of vast drying beds full of bright red cherries, now they saw it for themselves. It could be done.
And done without vast sums of money or advanced technology. The Ethiopians picked cherries the same way the Yemenis did, by hand, but with greater care, and they used more precise methods all along the chain of production. The only facet of Ethiopian production that had no bearing on Yemeni growers was the use of wet processing. The Ethiopians were using vast amounts of water to wash their beans. Typically the coffee farms were located near rivers, and the Ethiopians were diverting river water to clean their coffee, and then allowing the runoff to re-enter the water system.
But the runoff was not potable, and because the water was now mixed with sugars from coffee plants, it altered the chemistry of any river or stream or water table it entered. In a world concerned with water usage and the dwindling access to fresh water—and the rising cost of fresh water—using so much of it in coffee processing wasn’t, it seemed, politically or financially tenable in the long term.
Some Ethiopian coffee farmers were already experimenting with dry processing. In Yemen, Mokhtar knew they had no choice. Producers there knew no other way, and would rarely have access to the volumes of water necessary for wet processing. Dry processing had been the only way of Yemeni coffee since the beginning. It was both the strength of Yemeni beans and their weakness. Traditional dry processing had the potential to capture unusual flavors and could bring out the wildest and boldest parts of a bean. But dry processing, if done without great care, led to quality so inconsistent that the coffee was commodity-grade at best.
—
In Ethiopia, Mokhtar saw vast aboveground drying beds filled with ruby-red cherries. He saw small farms with their own varietal labels, farms sending their coffee directly to roasters in Europe and Japan. He saw the effects of direct trade, where the roasters told the farmers what they needed, and the farmers knew how to accommodate those needs. It was a beautiful symbiosis, without layers of brokers and loan sharks that invariably sapped the producers of profit.
Mokhtar flew back to Yemen, wanting to share what he’d seen with Yusuf and the al-Amal Cooperative. He tried calling them for days and got no answer. Finally Yusuf picked up.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “We had a death in the village.”
“Who was it?” Mokhtar asked.
“It was Malik,” Yusuf said. “He died the night you left.”
Mokhtar couldn’t make sense of it.
“He was very old,” Yusuf said.
—
Mokhtar went to Haymah to pay his respects. He found Malik’s widow, named Warda, sitting in the upper story of her house. From the open windows, a cool breeze passed through the room. On the roof above, red cherries were drying. Mokhtar told Warda how sorry he was. Like her husband, she was very quiet, difficult to read. And like Malik, she was tiny, no more than five feet tall.
“I will take care of you,” Mokhtar said. He told her how much her and her husband’s coffee meant to him, and how he would always support her.
She didn’t seem to have any idea what he was talking about. Mokhtar saw the scene through her eyes—her husband of fifty years had died a few days earlier, and now an American, whom she�
��d never met, was promising to take care of her?
Mokhtar met her son Ahmed, and they talked about the future. Mokhtar was conflicted, though. His own business depended to some extent on the ability of Malik and Warda’s farm to continue to produce the quality of coffee that had scored so high just a month ago. It seemed doubtful that the farm could continue without Malik.
—
The General wants to see you. This was the message relayed to Mokhtar. He walked to the General’s farm. From the start, the General had been the most suspicious of Mokhtar, given his Rupert clothing and city ways, but the sharpshooting contest had softened him to some extent.
Now they sat, just the two of them, and chewed qat. Mokhtar showed him photos from Ethiopia, the red cherries and drying beds, and the General examined them closely. The General, qat brightening his mood, talked about his time in the army and wanted to know how it was that Mokhtar had learned to shoot that well. Mokhtar told the truth, that he had learned in Bakersfield with Rakan and Rafik, and in Ibb, with Hamood. He mentioned that Rafik had been a cop in Oakland and had been the top marksman at the police academy. Somehow, over the next few weeks, this story evolved, traveling and expanding from the General throughout the village, until it was known that Mokhtar was the best marksman in California, having been trained by a Special Forces soldier.
The General pledged his commitment to Mokhtar’s work, and promised to build the first drying bed in Haymah. A few weeks later, he had done it. The Ethiopians’ version had been welded from aluminum, but otherwise the General’s drying bed looked identical. It was enormous and sturdy and would hold ten thousand cherries, the bulk of his harvest. He’d built it from local wood after simply looking at the picture on Mokhtar’s phone.
—
Hubayshi didn’t call Mokhtar often. Usually it was Mokhtar calling him.
“I have twenty tons for you,” Hubayshi said. “We picked them like you asked. Everything red.”
Mokhtar was skeptical. Hubayshi was almost eighty and had been trading in low-quality commodity coffee for fifty years. Mokhtar had given him guidelines to meet specialty coffee standards, but he had no expectations that the old man would be able to get there—or that he would even try. Now he was saying he had twenty tons of specialty coffee.
When Mokhtar arrived the next day, it was true. Hubayshi’s staff had picked the cherries ruby red and had kept the lots separated. They had bagged and labeled the coffees as Mokhtar had instructed. There were three primary sources: the Huwaar Valley in Ibb province, the village of Rawaat in the Udain region, and coffee from Wadi al-Jannat, the Valley of Paradise. In all, twenty tons. This was far more than the al-Amal Cooperative could possibly muster.
If Hubayshi’s coffee cupped well, and if Mokhtar had the money to actually buy it, he’d have enough specialty coffee, eighteen thousand kilograms, to fill a container.
—
As Mokhtar traveled throughout the Ibb Valley, his entourage grew. There was always Nurideen, but now Yusuf from the al-Amal Cooperative often came along, as did a rotating array of other farmers he’d already convinced to join his movement. And there was no one more committed than the General. He loved field trips to other farms, and his presence was particularly crucial in convincing other villages, other co-ops, to adopt Mokhtar’s methods.
One day, in a small village a hundred miles from Haymah, the entourage had taken a tour of the farms, and had eaten lunch, and afterward, about twenty local men were relaxing and chewing qat. Mokhtar, perhaps too emboldened by the qat, was expounding about not just the ways the farmers could and should improve their cultivation methods, but how they were currently being exploited, enslaved even, by the loan sharks who operated in the region.
“They take advantage of you,” he roared. “You’re selling far too low. Sell to me instead and you’ll be free of these criminals. You’ll be free, period. You won’t be forever indebted to these sharks.”
Mokhtar usually made it a point, whenever talking to an audience of farmers, to know the important players in the room, the head of the co-op and which elders held sway. But this time his intelligence was poor. The man sitting next to him, wearing a checkered kaffiyeh and carrying a ragged mix of paper and cash in his vest, was himself a loan shark—the very loan shark who had all the local farmers under his thumb.
He stood and turned to Mokhtar. “How can you come in here and tell these people this nonsense?” He narrowed his eyes at Mokhtar. “You know, a man like you came here a few years ago. He was from Saudi Arabia, and came promising the same kinds of things. And he didn’t come to such a good ending.”
Mokhtar registered the message; this man was threatening to kill him. He reached slowly for his SIG Sauer, hidden in his sarong. He had no intention of firing it, but thought he might need it to get out of the village alive. He couldn’t gauge the mood of the room. Were they aligned with the shark, or with Mokhtar?
Across the room, another man stood up. Mokhtar put on his glasses to see who it was. It was the General, his eyes enraged. He plucked one of the grenades from his jacket and raised it high over his head as he strode across the room, toward Mokhtar and toward the loan shark next. He put himself between Mokhtar and the man, the grenade almost touching the man’s trembling face.
“If you interfere with Mokhtar,” the General hissed, “you answer to me.”
The loan shark smiled stiffly and sat down.
CHAPTER XXVI
MONEY IN YOUR HAND, NOT IN YOUR HEART
MOKHTAR WAS BUYING COFFEE but had nowhere to process it.
The only processing plant Mokhtar knew of was run by a man named Shabbir Zafir. He’d met him months ago and knew his reputation. Zafir was Indian, and his Arabic was terrible, but he told his buyers in Asia and Europe that he was Yemeni. There were hundreds of thousands of immigrants in Yemen, and most of them had assimilated to some extent, but there was something about Zafir’s way that bothered Mokhtar. And he processed his coffee in the same factory that made paper, a situation that prevented any of Zafir’s coffee from being more than passable. There was no way to remove the vague smell of paper from the beans.
But for now Mokhtar had no choice. Abdo Alghazali had told Mokhtar not to work with Andrew Nicholson, the only other man he knew with a mill in Sana’a. His reasons for shunning this Andrew Nicholson—who had appeared in Mokhtar’s original SWOT chart—were vague, but Abdo Alghazali was insistent. There would come a time when Mokhtar might have his own mill, but for the time being he had to choose the lesser of two evils, and that was Zafir. Mokhtar went to Sana’a with samples of all three Hubayshi lots.
At Zafir’s plant, Mokhtar had to contend with Suha, who handled the day-to-day operations. Mokhtar gave her Hubayshi’s samples, and put in an order to have the samples hulled and sorted. Suha was always haughty and usually brusque, and as Mokhtar talked to her, he saw the sorters at their posts, about twenty women sitting at wooden tables, their beans in two piles in front of them. The sorters were silent, prohibited from listening to music, and he felt for them then and every time he visited in the next week, coming back three different times to find his samples unfinished.
Suha provided excuses, but Mokhtar was running out of time. He needed the samples processed so he could roast and cup them, and send samples to Willem, who was in Ethiopia. But Suha was dragging her feet, and one day, amid the twenty silent sorters, Mokhtar lost his temper.
“If you can’t run this mill,” he roared, “you should sell it to me!”
Mokhtar had no idea why he said it. He had no money to buy a mill. But sometimes he put on the costume of the wealthy Yemeni American, knowing the people in a room like this wouldn’t know if he was bluffing or not. The sorters looked up briefly before going back to work. But once Suha left the room, one of the sorters, an uncovered woman of about thirty, approached him.
“If you’re buying this mill, take me with you,” she said in English.
Her eyes were steady. Mokhtar was startled. The presence of an Eng
lish-speaking sorter at a coffee mill was unexpected in itself, but her boldness in speaking to him in front of the rest of the sorters was remarkable.
“I will,” he said in English. “What’s your name?”
“Amal,” she said.
“Where can we talk?”
They arranged to meet the next day in a coffee shop.
When they met, she told him of the wretched conditions at Zafir’s mill. The hours were long, the pay was dismal and it rarely arrived on time. They were not allowed to talk, to sing, to play music. One of the women had worked through the early stages of a pregnancy, and when she miscarried and fell ill, she was fired. Mokhtar thought of his grandmother in Richgrove, her many stories of the injustices visited upon farmworkers in the Central Valley. His grandmother’s sense of outrage was his own.
“If you set up your own processing plant,” Amal said, “I’ll follow you. And I’ll get the rest of the women to come with me.”
—
Over the next two days at Zafir’s, the women finished sorting his samples, and in a rush he packed them to be sent to Willem in Addis. He went to the DHL center in Sana’a and encountered the kind of add-ons he expected in Yemen. He had weighed his samples repeatedly and knew that he was sending Willem three samples, a total of 3 kilos. But the clerk at DHL said it was 4.2 kilos, and wanted a hundred dollars extra for it.
“Please,” Mokhtar said. “Don’t do this. I know it’s three kilos.”
The clerk weighed the package again, and again the digital readout said 4.2 kilos. Mokhtar checked to see if the clerk’s hand was on the scale, but saw the man’s hands at his side. Mokhtar had witnessed minor frauds like this dozens of times in Yemen, but this was impressive. Somehow the clerk had rigged the scale, he figured.