So I'm in Rwanda for the next five months or so, and instead of emailing everyone the same thing, it seems like a good idea to start a blog instead. First, I should explain the name, mzungu means foreigner in kinyarwandan and I'm mainly working on projects to do with coffee, so cafemzungu seems as sensible as anything else I could think of. This is going to be a bit of a monster post to start off....
I'm living in Butare, which is in the South of Rwanda and it is the second city. At the moment I'm living in the uruhongore, which apparently translates as the cowshed. It's pretty basic but it's has a roof, running water, a door that locks, a bed, a mosquito net and only costs £5 a night, so I can't complain. The toilet doesn't flush and before I fixed it with my shoelace, the shower was pretty useless. (If an anyone can work out how you can fix a shower with a shoelace, I'll bring you back a kilo of coffee) I should be moving into a house later this week which will only cost £2 a day which will be good. It doesn't have a kitchen, which is slightly problematic, but hopefully I can sort out a gas stove and a barbecue.
I'm working (unpaid) with a USAID project called SPREAD which is an acronym for something like sustaining partnerships, something something and development (google 'spread rwanda'). They have various projects in both agriculture and healthcare, but I'm working on a few things to do with coffee, in particular trying to improve the quality. If like me two weeks ago you've never thought about coffee production, then search for 'maraba coffee' and 'coffee processing' on Wikipedia and you'll get some idea of what's involved. The first thing I'm working on is an experiment where we will vary how long the coffee is 'fermented' (it's not really fermentation, but that's what it's called). Coffee beans are basically the seeds of a berry, and we'll be testing how the quality of coffee is affected depending on how long the beans are left sitting in a tank after they have been removed from the berry, but before they have been washed. It's probably going to involve staying up all night at the processing centers when we sample the beans which will be... interesting... but we should hopefully get some good results which should allow the processing to be refined in future years. There are other projects to do with composting of the coffee waste and organic pest control, but I'll probably work more on these once the harvest is over (it starts in the next few weeks and lasts until the start of June or so).
The Rwandan landscape is incredible – it makes the west country seem flat in comparison! It's called the country of a thousand hills, but apparently that is a poor translation and it should be thousands and thousands of hills. It makes driving anywhere very time consuming, particularly as a lot of the roads aren't in a particularly great condition. To give you some idea of what I mean, even though Rwanda is about the same size as Northern Ireland, it would probably take about ten hours to drive from the far south-west to the north-east. We drove through the Ngunwe national park this weekend which was absolutely amazing. It's some of the most pristine rainforest left in Eastern Africa and it's easy to see why as the slopes are over 45 degrees in most places. Annoyingly it costs $50 to go for treks in the park, but considering it costs $500 to see the gorillas it doesn't seem so bad. I'll try to find out if I can tag along with some researchers from the university in Butare at some point too. We drove through to visit a coffee washing station in the south-west of Rwanda, near the border with the DRC. It was good to finally get out and see some coffee shrubs, as well as all the other crops that Rwandans grow. They are pretty damn clever at farming, nearly all their crops are intercropped, so for example mixing bananas, beans and cassava all together which helps everything grow better. I think I counted up to five crops together in some places.
My Kinyarwandan vocabulary is slowly growing, it's pretty difficult to learn as it is pretty much nothing like European languages, but hopefully in a few months I'll be able to say something remotely useful to farmers. Fortunately a lot of people in Butare speak English and or French, so even with my rudimentary French I can get by.
Unfortunately for the moment, this blog is going to have to remain illustration-less. The internet is pretty temperamental here and ~10kbps at best! If I find a better connection sometime then I'll try to add a few photos for your perusal.
That's all for now, next time you're in Tesco, be sure to pick up some Rwandan coffee!
I like your "monster post", it was bite size and interesting. Although I am a scientist, so am possible biased. Do you get stimulated by coffee beans if you chew them? How do you judge quality of bean without brewing them? Or do you actually have to drink coffee. Surely there's no scientific way. Or is it how many particles are in the water? Or how big the beans get. Also, if it's been happening for years, why hasn't someone done this monitoring experiment before? x
ReplyDeletemzungu is "white person" in swahili, how versatile.
ReplyDeleteInteresting questions Alex... yes you can get stimulated from chewing coffee beans, supposedly people first found out about coffee when they saw their goats being more energetic after eating the berries of the shrubs.
ReplyDeleteAs to why no one has done the experiments before; they have but not in Rwanda. There are a lot of different processing methods used around the world and for the type predominantly used here (dry fermentation), the temperature (elevation) at which it occurs affects the speed of the process. Also the sugar content of the berries changes with altitude (slower to ripen and therefore sweeter the higher you go) and so we need to work out the best way to process here. They did an experiment in 2007 in one location but they only started to sample after 10 hours and found that the quality then improved over the next 12 hours. The interesting thing is that the quality actually decreased after the first sample and then improved again, now we wonder whether the quality might actually be better when it is fermented for less time, but that this was missed last time round.
To sample the quality you have to roast and brew the coffee and then taste it. I agree that it seems very unscientific, but the people who do it are pros and do it all the time. I guess you could use GCMS but it would be very expensive and you'd have to work out which molecules are tasty and which aren't. It is all done to some international standard protocol, and seeming what a huge industry coffee is (apparently the third most valuable crop after wheat and sugar) I take it that they know what they are doing! You're right that the size of beans matters too, bigger is better!
Oh yea, I was wrong, mzungu is specific to white people here too... doh! I can't be bothered to work out how to edit the post though.
Hi Sime - coffee is actually the 2nd largest (legal) commmodity in the world, after oil, so I think it's bigger than wheat or sugar.
ReplyDeleteGlad you're gettting some "cupping" experience - that's what we call the tasting of coffee when you brew it without a filter.
Toby