A Rooster, A Boy, And A Washed Coffee

It had never occurred to me that a rooster is born without its wattles and therefore without the ability to crow.

It’s a bit like trying to imagine Salvador Dali or Charlie Chaplin before they hit puberty – are they still Dali and Chaplin without their signature mustaches?

Or what about Pavarotti before his voice broke? Often the iconic images and figures of our world exist in our minds as locked in time – without beginning or end. The rooster was a bit like Dali, Chaplin or Pavarotti to me, until I awoke to the sound of pubescent crowing at 6 am on a Monday morning in Kampala.

I had one night in Kampala on my way from Kenya to eastern Uganda – just enough time to be introduced to the young rooster reaching adulthood in the yard of the house where I stayed. I was told that two weeks earlier he had still been wrestling to get his crow out – vocalizing some half squawk at around 10 am. Today he got his timing right and woke us with the dawn of an equatorial sunrise – only slightly tapering off at the end of his crow attempt. He had come a long way in two weeks.

I had come from northern Kenya where I had been filming educational material in the Kakuma refugee camp. My camera crew consisted of two bright, young men who were as full of ambition and hope as their situations were bleak and taxing.

In the back of UN Land Rovers, along dusty arid roads cutting through fields of temporary tents, over ugali and a traditional Ethiopian coffee ceremony, and between shoots with our actors, stories unfolded of where they had journeyed from and where they dreamed of heading to.

On my way back through Nairobi from Uganda a week later, I glanced over a business plan put together by one of the boys. As my eyes drifted down the page – taking in the vision of Kakuma’s first coffee shop – I could see it playing out in my mind’s eye as clear as the footage stored on our video camera.

I imagined sitting in his café one day – dreams realized – the boy without a state now in a state of exhilaration at the environment he had walked into existence. I thought of how strange it would be for anyone walking in to think of this young man as anything other than a successful businessman. How strange to think that this stature of confidence and competence was once a tender young silhouette against the equatorial skies – buckled under the weight of fear and uncertainty in the long journey out through southern Oromia and into the Rift Valley of northern Kenya.

It would be like imagining a rooster without its wattles – without its signature, identity-defining crow. Had not this businessman always been the founder and manager of Kakuma’s first café? Could anyone imagine him as a young boy of six – fleeing the birthplace of coffee years earlier?

From the birthplace of coffee, the Ethiopian bean had traveled with the boy’s family across the border to Kenya. Centuries earlier it had traveled with traders into eastern Uganda and taken root on the foothills of the great Mount Elgon that straddles Kenya and Uganda. And there I now stood – checking up on the current and potential quality of the cooperative’s coffee.

It’s processed using the washed method – some of it centrally at the washing station and some of it pulped and dried by individual farmers on their plots of land. Without the fermentation tanks to give the beans space and time to fully develop in flavor before being washed again, this coffee doesn’t taste like it will one day when the washing station is expanded to include the tanks.

And still, it tastes far better than most washed coffees. Already today it has a complexity of flavor and cleanness in the cup that some fully-washed coffees could envy. I stare down at this incomplete washing station – the Penagos pulper, the single concrete tank, the little drainage channel running off into the valley – and marvel that this has produced the coffee I had imagined to be fully-washed before I arrived on the scene.

I think of how one day we will taste this coffee as fully-washed and we will wonder that it came from the same tree. Our minds will battle to understand the change.

As I hike through the hectares of coffee – embedded between vanilla stalks and ginger plants, amongst cedar trees and cocoa pods – I meet these farmers who once found themselves entangled in Idi Amin induced interfaith violence and who now call the interfaith coffee cooperative home.

The yarmulke-toting chairman of the coop asks the Anglican farmer a question in Luganda – the Muslim interprets for us. It’s a scene that makes imagining the era of the so-called ‘wrangles’ difficult to imagine.

A bit like roosters without wattles – it’s hard to imagine anything other than what we can see now.