I sigh. I’m so tired.
He crams our bags around his feet, behind the bench, and in between his seat and ours, then positions our bodies just so. I prop my foot high on a steel bar so I don’t slide off the bench and onto the highway with Finn on my lap. Tate and Reed squeeze in the middle together, and Kyle miraculously sits sideways on the edge. The driver pulls into traffic and speeds up to forty miles per hour, dodging in and out of what would be lanes if lanes existed in Sri Lanka. With one hand I hold on to the rickshaw, with the other I squeeze Finn; I pass the time ignoring my itchy nose and reading passing bumper stickers in English, like Your love gives me thunder. The ride takes an hour, and the kids pass the time with skip-counting math songs, their mouths singing inches from my ear. Kyle stares straight ahead, eyes darting with the traffic as if he’s playing a video game. He loves this.
When we eventually pull off our bags, we see that the driver shoved Tate’s pack against his greasy gearshift, and her doll’s face was propped out of the zippered enclosure. The doll’s nose and chin are smudged with grease. Tate hides her tears. The driver laughs, asks for more money than was originally agreed.
The guesthouse we booked is already filled with guests, says the owner when we arrive. But he also owns the house next door, still under construction, and hopes we’ll find it accommodating until tomorrow morning, when the original guesthouse can be solely ours until our flight. I exert all my physical strength to not roll my eyes in weariness. In the backup house, we toss our backpacks on stacks of shrink-wrapped new tile, eat Indian takeout on the floor, and take cold showers. Before crashing into bed, we unwrap the guesthouse’s new pillows from their plastic bags.
Early the next morning, we walk over piles of stone, past flip-flopped jackhammering construction workers in the yard, to our booked house. The backyard pool is full of chemicals and won’t be ready until tonight, the owner says. But the cook that comes with the house helps us bide our time with a breakfast of eggs, sausage, and instant coffee, and I thank God that back in Sydney I loaded all our e-readers with books. That feels like a lifetime ago.
We read chapters and chapters that day, suspended in this Sri Lankan intermission. At seven in the evening, the kids begin to swim, and they stay in the cloudy water for three hours. At midnight, we wake them up, toss on clothes, and climb into the four-door car waiting for us outside, a quiet sedan with seat belts. The drive takes two minutes. Sri Lanka remains a mystery.
PART IV
Nobody can discover the world for someone else. Only when we discover it for ourselves does it become common ground and a common bond and we cease to be alone.
—Wendell Berry
10
UGANDA
We sit on covered cushions and faded blankets on a dirt floor in one of the two rooms of this house. The walls are made of the same hardened mud as the courtyard outside the doorless entry. It’s as though the house erupted organically from its natural setting, though I know it was fashioned by the hands that live here. I gather with an Ethiopian family—mother, younger sister, and brothers—sit in a corner, and watch as a traditional Ethiopian coffee ceremony unfolds. The eldest daughter, Birhan, roasts green coffee beans over a plate of hot coals, swirls the beans with a stick. Their aroma washes over me, conjures a nostalgic hint of coffee shops back home. I wonder if I’ve ever sipped an espresso bought in Oregon and made from beans grown a hundred feet from here. It’s possible. The family members wave their hands to their noses, inhale the scent of roasting coffee. It smells like home to them too. I copy them. This takes a while—maybe twenty minutes of this aroma bath—and we watch, smile at one another across the language barrier.
Next, Birhan pours the now mahogany-colored coffee beans from the plate into a vessel, and with two hands, pounds in dutiful rhythm with a three-foot chunk of rebar. Thump, thump, thump, thump. It’s the same sound as the coffee vendor in the old market in Izmir, Turkey, where we used to live. Every ten seconds, she pauses, checks the status of the beans, then continues.
Once they’re ground, Birhan pours the coffee into a jebena, a clay pot with a bulbous base and twiggy pouring spout. Water bubbles inside, percolating the beans and spitting partially brewed coffee out the spout, until a roiling boil reaches the pot’s neck. I notice another smell: the scent of myrrh burning as incense, leathery and nutty, as one of the brothers brings a bowl with a hypnotic stream of smoke wafting up to the thatched ceiling and sets it next to the coffee. It mingles with the scent of the coffee, which hints of, oddly enough, early summer blueberries. The rich, sweet smoke billows above our heads. Birhan empties the coffee into a bowl, then returns it to the jebena for a second brew. Then a third. Then, at last, it’s ready.
Birhan’s mother, Tigist, takes over. She pours the coffee over a tight collection of small, handleless cups, letting the brew spill over between them until they’re all full. She adds sugar to each cup, then passes the tray around, first to us, as guests, then to her family.
Coffee is sacred in Ethiopia. An invitation to attend a coffee ceremony is considered a mark of friendship, and we have known each other for several years now, even though we just met today. A bowl of popcorn is passed—the mainstay always accompanying the national drink—and Tigist and I raise our tiny cups of brew, nod to each other from across the room, and sip. We toast to a friendship that spans miles, languages, and our different lots in life. We are mothers; we belong to each other. This coffee brings us together.
Two weeks ago, I worked from a coffee shop in a Sydney suburb. A year ago, I worked at a coffee shop tucked in the mountains of central Oregon. On this day, I am in a minuscule village in the Ethiopian Highlands, not far from the origins of my favorite drink, sipping coffee brewed from beans just picked from the tree. I am with friends. I’m not sure what I expected from Africa when I boarded that plane to Uganda one week ago, but it was not this.