Sunday, June 3, 2012

Coffee Rituals

I was thinking back to that rough, cold and wet morning I spent in the village of Antsiraka at the tip of the eastern peninsula on my way to Ile St. Marie last month. During the morning hours that our boat crew waited out the wind and rain, I sat huddled in the kitchen of one of the Malagasy families in the village watching coffee be prepared and consumed. The whole process got me thinking about how we consume coffee in America. The cultural comparison of the two rituals is quite a juxtaposition of polar opposites. Here's what I observed that groggy morning in the village of Antsiraka:

Since I didn't fall asleep for even five minutes during that cold, uncomfortable night in the village, I witnessed dawn breaking as its faint light filtered through the bamboo walls of the hut. Around 6AM I heard the grandmother calling from the shack next door that served as the kitchen, asking her husband who was in our hut where the coffee was. "It should be in a plastic sache in the kitchen," he answered drearily in Malagasy from his bed. I was fed up with laying on the cold floor, so I decided to join the grandmother in the kitchen in hopes of stealing some warmth from the cookfire that she was starting up.

As I entered the kitchen, the grandmother was stoking the wood fire. Though the smoke made my eyes water and throat burn, I gladly entered the small shack and sat on a woven grass mat on the floor to near the cooking area to observe the coffee-making process and to warm my hands by the fire. Eventually the grandmother found the small plastic bag of green, unroasted coffee beans that she had probably bought from a farmer in the village who had harvested them from a nearby field earlier that year.

The grandmother proceeded to place an up-turned pot lid on top of the iron, triangular frame over the fire and dropped the beans in the metal pot lid to roast. She periodically stirred the beans around in the lid for 5 or 10 minutes until they acquired a jet-black hue-- the super-dark French Roast that the Malagasies never stray from when preparing their coffee.

After the beans were done, she gave them to her son to pound outside in the large wooden mortar and pestle. From inside the warm kitchen, I listened to the rhythmmic thumping of coffee pounding as the grandma scooped some river water from a plastic bucket and set it to boil in a pot over the fire. Then she rinsed out the coffee sock, consiting of a mesh stocking attached to a plastic handle.

After the coffee had been hand-pounded to a coarse powder, the young man handed the jar full of coffee grounds to his mother. She put a few scoops from the jar into the coffee sock and poured the boiling water through the sock and into the pot below several times over. Meanwhile, she had sent her husband to bike five minutes into the village to buy local, raw cane sugar from one of the small shops.

After the sugar arrived in another plastic sache, she added several heaping spoonfuls to the freshly brewed coffee and doled out small "tasse de cafes" of sugary black substance to as many as ten different people. Neighbors came by throughout the morning to bring news from the village and take a few sips of coffee offered to them in the tiny, tin cups. Most of the talk was of the birth that had occurred next door during the night. With the help of the local midwife, there was a newborn babe amongst us. Others discussed the weather and the condition of the sea and debated whether or not we'd be able to cross the 7km channel to get to St. Marie that day.

Overall I was just astounded by the whole process that the old woman went through to make coffee just so she could offer a few hot sips to each surrounding neighbor. And of course there was no luxury of adding milk to the black coffee. Some people in the village do herd cows, but for the type of cow and their nutritional status, they hardly produce milk regularly. As there is no refridgeration in the village, there would be no way to store any milk that was produced for more than a day. If there happened to be fresh milk, it would also probably be too expensive for the average Malagasy family to afford. Even the tinned, sweetened condensed milk that's available in some shops is still cost prohibitive for most and difficult to keep the ants out of once the tin is opened.

So we drank our sugary shots of black coffee by the warmth of the kitchen's cookfire and chatted about everything from life in America to the island of St. Marie to development work to Malagasy culture, or, "fomba." The whole communal and labor intensive process is so different from the way we have our cofee in America.

Some Americans grab their java on their way to the office, in giant plastic or paper cups from coffee shops with their choice of different kinds of flavorings and and milks added. Others perpare the percolator with grocery store pre-ground coffee and disposable paper filters the night before so that all they have to do in the morning is plug the machine into the wall and wait twenty minutes in order to enjoy two or three giant ceramic mugfulls of coffee all to themselves with pasteurized milk from the fridge and granulated white sugar from the cupboard. They may drink their coffee while reading the paper or surfing the web on their laptops from their kitchen tables. Both the American and Malagasy coffee rituals have their drawbacks and advantages, but I will surely miss the Malagasy "fomba" of preparing and drinking coffee when I am back in America.

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