Mama Nazrite’s Coffee

‘This is for Dad’ she said with that undying smile of hers as she looked up at me, half slyly, from her short perch near the earthen floor of her kitchen. In the shadowy recesses of this humble half-outdoor kitchen stood the Turkana woman. Her body – normally of tall Maasai-like stature – looked hunched over the fire. She stood stooped in part by that slanting section of roof she was positioned under, in part to tend to the roasting of the green coffee beans.

Silently, and almost invisibly, she hovered behind a screen of smoke as she carefully, methodically roasted the Ethiopian beans from musty green to hay bale yellow to caramelized brown to a hue as dark as a night in the Turkana country out under a moonless, starless sky.

The Turkana woman was onto a unnumbered batch that had been drawn from the enormous 60-kilo bag of green coffee that was slumped into the same corner as the roaster. There was no telling how long she had been hidden in the smoke – roasting away. Except when I looked to the pile of little bagged roasted coffees by Mama Nazrite’s feet – I had some idea.

Mama Nazrite sat perched by the kitchen door, smiling up at me, as she artfully picked out defective beans from the roast spread into an expansive circumference on the wide wicker weave basket that sat on her knees. I marveled both at how the Turkana seemed to roast coffee as though in an automatic trance and how Mama Nazrite’s nimble fingers could find the defective beans without breaking eye contact with me.

We sent a half kilo bag of oily, black-as-Turkana-night coffee beans to Dad, as per Mama Nazrite’s repeated instructions. We agreed the drinker of dark roast coffees pushed through the intensity of a stovetop mocha pot would enjoy these beans most. Into my bag I packed a wafer thin plastic bag – tied up in a short knot at the top. The beans threatened to either pour out the top or explode through the thin membrane of the shoddy plastic.

In the environs of the refugee home – where colors, smells and sounds are all on a scale past anything quotidian to me – the coffee blended right in. Back in our entirely indoor kitchen – surrounded by things like filtered water and sturdy milk cartons, ordered cutlery and ironed cloth dining napkins – the beans suddenly took on a bolder presence in their muted new environment.

We ground and brewed the beans and filtered them through the AeroPress coffee maker to extract an intense, short brew. Every step confronted our senses. The beans snapped in the grinder – not merely releasing but exploding out a complexity of fragrance that took me straight back to the kitchen in the Turkana County of northern Kenya. As hot water hit the coffee grounds an aroma erupted to infuse our entire home. The beans and their ensuing brew seemed to dance with as many shades of dark as I had seen night skies over the years.

We cautiously sipped from our cups of Mama Nazrite’s coffee, confident of this – that the final sense would hit us just as forcefully as all our previous senses had.

The taste was wild.

The coffee seemed to pack in every other sense into that final sense of taste. The smell, the sight, the sound all combined into one and arrested our palates with one final exuberant blow.

As I drank I began to see the sights and sounds of Kakuma once again. In a sip and an instant I was standing back in the doorway – Mama Nazrite smiling up at me in her sideways way, saying, ‘this is for Dad.’