Pot of Gold

Yes, Addisu tells them after conferring with his staff, there is wild coffee growing near Gesha. That's a good sign, but he has bad news. "It looks like you cannot go there this week," he says with official finality. "From Mizan, it used to be possible to drive, but now it is impossible. From this place to that specific area of Gesha, eight hours on foot. From the town of Gesha, you have to walk another three hours to get to the coffee area." He points to the torrential rain pouring down outside his window. "If you're out tomorrow and it rains like this when you are in the mountains..." He trails off with a shrug.

"We have come so far," protests Brodsky, Abay filming his frustrated countenance. He's sick of all the driving, all the planning. He's dying to get out into the forest.

Addisu just shakes his head. "This area, it is very bad. A BBC journalist, he traveled to an area where people were starving of hunger," he says. "He stayed for one month and lost forty kilograms weight."

It would not be your typical walk in the woods.

"Okay, we should probably get going," Boot says to Addisu. "We don't want to steal your afternoon with our silly quest for the Geisha."

"No, no, not silly for us," replies Addisu. "If our farmers can get some benefit from this project, we are delighted."

Everyone knows Addisu is not just being polite. There's an unspoken understanding here that Ethiopia's coffee farmers are getting the very short end of the stick. While coffee geeks like to compare java's potential to wine, the two drinks differ in one fundamental way: Turning a good grape into a bottle of fine wine is usually under the purview of a single vineyard, but a great coffee bean must pass through numerous hands -- farmers, millers, co-op owners, exporters, importers, roasters, baristas. For a coffee entrepreneur like Brodsky, this means there are innumerable nerve-racking ways that the precious, fickle beans may be ruined before they reach consumers. For the 1.2 million subsistence coffee farmers in Ethiopia and the millions more like them worldwide, the situation is far more calamitous.

While Novo may charge a hefty $2.25 for a no-frills twenty-ounce cup of Ethiopian, by the time that money filters through the supply chain to the coffee farmers, just a few cents are left. Most Ethiopian farmers get by on less than a dollar a day, tending some of the world's finest beans in meager gardens around their one-room shacks while their barefoot children beg for change on the side of the road. And even that paltry livelihood cannot be guaranteed. Ethiopia's coffee industry, like that of essentially every java-producing nation, is inexorably tied to the boom-and-bust variability of the commodity-coffee market. In 2002, when an international java glut sank world coffee prices to a thirty-year low, Ethiopian coffee cooperatives went bankrupt. Coffee fields were torn up to make room for chat. People could no longer afford clothes, medicine or food.

It was a stark reminder that in this country, a tiny bean lies at the heart of everything: the economy, the culture, the society itself. When coffee prices fail, Ethiopia collapses from within.

"Coffee is a product that people feel passionately about, and yet it is a horrible product in so many ways," says Mark Pendergrast, author of Uncommon Grounds, a comprehensive history of coffee. "Coffee provides a sort of a metaphor for the inequality built into our capitalism system."

The Geisha is another metaphor: All beans are not created equal, and this mythic bean could represent salvation for Ethiopian farmers. Now the team has learned the bean could be almost within reach, but there's no practical way to get there. "You have to be realistic. You cannot take an eleven-hour walking journey without any specific equipment," Boot says to Brodsky as they leave Addisu's office. "That sucks."

It's not the only thing that will suck today. The plan is to spend the night at a thinly veiled bordello, a place where the "bar girls" gyrate to Tupac while waiting for customers, a shabby but tolerable choice. But while the faranjis stand outside this establishment in the rain, the proprietors confess that there's been a scheduling mixup, and no rooms are available. Everyone will have to stay down the road...at the bad hotel.

The bad hotel is heroic in its depravity, a stark cement hulk rising from a moat of foul-smelling mud. Bedrooms are dingy cells populated by spiders the size of human hands; bathrooms are feces-smeared holes in the floor. A flickering orange luminescence illuminates the scene, courtesy of the piles of burning trash smoldering just beyond the hotel's razor-wired gate.

De Jong leans over the hotel's rusty balcony, watching the pyrotechnics. She takes a swig of Black Label and chuckles, her face illuminated in an Apocalypse Now-like hue. "Nothing in coffee is ever quick and simple," she says. "That's the truth."