There is nothing like coffee to take your mind off of things. And this is exactly how I felt when we visited the Maraba Coffee Cooperative outside of Murambi. With the intensity of the sites that we had visited, it was a relief to see that there was an attempt to return to some semblance of normalcy in post-genocide Rwanda.

Prior to the genocide, coffee had been one of the mainstays of the Rwandan economy. Immediately prior to the genocide, world coffee prices plummetted, having a drastic effect on the Rwandan economy. The Hutu were disproportionately affected by the fall in the market. Some scholars insist that this had a much more significant effect on the tenuous situation than many acknowledge. (See Jared Diamond's latest book, Collapse.)

Today the cooperative is training Rwandans to prepare their coffee for export. We visited the cooperative and were shown how the beans are culled, and how they are then roasted and prepared for export. The best part, however, was to see the tasters' room. I had heard of wine tasting - and even done some in my time - but I had never heard of coffee tasting. Similar to wine tasting - the coffee tasters do not swallow the coffee they are tasting. I think we can imagine what these people would be like at the end of an eight-hour workday if they did! They then rate the coffee along the same lines as we rate wine: did it taste of grass? chocolate? cherries? Sadly we did not get to taste the coffee that was there. We did learn, however, that the lowest quality beans are sent to Rwandan cafés. The first and second quality beans are impossible to buy in Rwanda; they are all exported to the west.