wooden bike coffee

my day begins with coffee - a beverage i developed a taste for as a student at trent university right here in peterborough. in those days - the mid to late seventies - i cannot recall much of a fetish or much in the way of knowledge around coffee. i drank it and it helped me wake up, stay awake, and mistakenly i also entrusted it with the capacity to reverse the effects of other liquids.

the beans of wonder and joy . . .
my consumption is in my own view reasonable. years ago i drank many many cups of coffee but now i restrict myself to two - and restrict sounds more puritanical than it actually is - i enjoy two cups at most - well, mugs - and those are both emptied into my system as early in the morning as i can stand it. from there the caffeine fuels me on my morning ride in and carries me on a caffeinated wave through the critical first hour of the teaching day. i like strong coffee, preferring the thick heavy rush of sumatran coffee to most others.

here’s a closeup of my dark master . . .
if you drink coffee you cannot ignore the simple fact that much of it is grown and harvested by people who are effectively slave labour, working in sometimes poor conditions, with no job security and little in the way of health care. “fair trade” coffee has been around for a while now and whenever and wherever possible i buy it in place of the ground beans i favour from starbucks.

there are several people who will provide not only fair trade beans but beans that are grown with sensitivity for the local ecology of which they are a part. one such company is wooden bike coffee. wooden bike is working in rwanda, a tiny african country bordered by uganda, burundi, the democratic republic of the congo and tanzania. in rwanda the bicycle is a symbol of progress and hope, yet only 1 out of 40 can afford a bike, so they make them out of wood.
these wooden bikes allow the growers to haul several hundred pounds of coffee cherries to the finishing stations quickly which as i am sure you can imagine, means that they get paid more money because a premium is put on fresh delivery. so, the bicycle is the perfect tool for transporting the coffee because of its easy maintenance and because it is extremely cheap to buy and operate.
here are a bank of the coffee bikes created by proceeds from this project . . .
if you’re interested and you’d like to buy some coffee to support both your caffeine addiction and the worthy work of wooden bike, then nip on over to equal world coffee who will happily sell you coffee online.