Cover
story
Good
to the last drop: reconciliation in a cup
By DENNIS CODAY
Paksae and Paksong, Laos
The rise in elevation is gradual but noticeable as the van climbs
more than 3,000 feet from the valley cut by the San and Mekong Rivers up to Phu
Phieng Boleven (the Boleven Plateau) in southern Laos. The air cools
considerably as the van grinds up the road. Lee Thorn and Theresa Kingston are
anxious to reach Paksong, a market town on the plateau above.
They have been away for eight months, and they are carrying
precious cargo: a one-pound bag of Jhai Coffee.
Jhai Coffee is an organically grown Arabica typica, a
premium coffee -- some have called it the finest in the world. Thorn and
Kingston are the U.S. end of the Jhai Coffee network. It is roasted and sold in
the United States, but it grows here on the Boleven Plateau.
Thorn and Kingston bring a bag of coffee so the growers can taste
their final product. The coffee is precious not so much because it retails for
$15 per pound, but because it represents the promise of a better life for so
many.
Jhai Coffee is rebuilding American and Laotian lives destroyed by
bombs, turning enemies into friends and -- as Thorn describes it -- bringing
reconciliation where once there was war.
From enemies to partners
In 1966, Lee Thorn was a young sailor on the aircraft carrier USS
Ranger in the Gulf of Tonkin. He loaded bombs onto fighter-bombers and later,
after the planes had returned, he would thread the projector to show bomber
crews “assessment films” of their raids. The bombs Thorn loaded
rained down on Laos as part of the nine-year, ultimately futile effort to
prevent supplies from reaching communist Vietcong forces attacking U.S.-backed
South Vietnam.
Thirty-six years later, Thorn walks amid the people he bombed as a
young man. He has met people whose families were destroyed and displaced, sent
into internal displacement camps and overseas as refugees. Thorn, too, could be
described as a bombing victim, but in a different context. A recovering
alcoholic and drug user with posttraumatic stress disorder, Thorn spent many
years after the war in his own internal exile.
Thorn’s first trip to Laos was serendipitous. A financial
windfall in 1997 allowed him to take a trip he always dreamed of: seeing the
orangutans on Borneo. A friend he would travel with suggested they visit Laos
too, but Thorn refused. Then he got a letter from Bounthanh Phommasathit, a
Laotian who went to America as a refugee in the 1970s. She was looking for help
to deliver a donation of medical supplies to a hospital in her home village in
central Laos. Thorn reluctantly agreed to deliver the supplies.
In January 1998, he visited the country he had seen countless
times in “assessment films.”
The doctor who accepted the medical supplies took Thorn to a local
Buddhist temple. More serendipity. The temple was adorned with the traditional
murals depicting the life and sermons of Buddha, but the mural that shows
scenes from hell included pictures of modern warfare -- guns and bombs and
soldiers in khaki uniforms. Thorn was moved to tears. But that night, for the
first time in decades, he slept a full night without nightmares.
Now Thorn and Laotian farmers and villagers are coming together
for a common purpose under the Jhai Foundation, a nonprofit organization
founded by Thorn and Bounthanh Phommasathit to provide development aid to Laos.
The foundation has stocked hospitals and clinics with basic medical supplies
and helped villages build schools, drill wells and organize a weaving
cooperative. In southern Laos, Jhai is working with coffee growers to get their
premium coffee into the world market instead of selling it for pennies a pound
to local traders.
According to Thorn, Jhai never brings a project to a village,
school or group. Instead, the programs arise out of the people’s desires
and expressed needs. Jhai engages people in a continual dialogue, explains
Thorn. He adds that the foundation works on the basis of jhai (heart)
and is less about results than establishing and maintaining relationships.
The taste of coffee
Curiosity and anticipation mark the faces of the people standing
around the counter of a small restaurant in Paksong. They are pawbaan
(literally “father” of the village), the leaders of the villages that
grow Jhai coffee. They have come to meet Thorn and Kingston for a meal of
laap moo (spicy minced pork), gai yang (fried chicken), tom
yam plaa (spicy-sour fish soup), khao ne-yeo (sticky rice) and fresh
vegetables. To top off the meal, the group shares cups of freshly ground and
brewed Jhai coffee.
The growers have never tasted their coffee roasted by a high
quality, professional roaster, prepared as the premium coffee it is. As the hot
water hits the fresh grounds and steam rises out of the coffee filter, eyes
light up. Smiles spread across faces.
Almost in unison they say, “Hawm, hawm mak [It smells
good, very good].” The hot coffee is poured into glasses, some mix in
sweetened condensed milk and sugar, and one after another says, “The taste
is good, very good.”
Village leader Nummula Thapbouly says, “This is much better
than we’ve had before. A very different taste. We’re used to drinking
instant coffee.”
Laos produces about 16,000 tons of coffee a year, but most of it
is low-quality robusta. For much of the last 30 years, Laos was not able
to export coffee. Slowly, foreign markets have opened up to Lao growers, mainly
through Vietnamese and Thai traders, but few saw the Arabica typica
plants as special. Beans from these trees were tossed into the bags and bins as
if they were robusta, and they fetched the same prices, around 26 cents
a pound in recent years.
Jhai buys the coffee beans at four or five times the market rate,
but they buy only the highest quality Arabica typica. To achieve the
necessary quality, the beans are left on the trees until each is the properly
ripe bright red color, and then each bean is picked by hand. The beans ripen
over a number of weeks between mid-October and early January.
In 2001, Jhai’s first operating year, the foundation bought
two tons from 80 farmers in three villages. Kingston, Jhai’s buyer and
quality-control expert, hopes to double that this year, and continue doubling
it annually over the next five to six years.
“Coffee is the only cash crop in this area,” Kingston
says. “So we need to get the coffee out there to the coffee drinkers. We
produce an excellent product, and we’ll get the money back to the people
who need it.”
Jhai is also working on getting the coffee groves around Paksong
certified as organic by an international body. This will help the growers to
continue to command top prices in the premium coffee market.
The jubilant mood at the restaurant turns somber when a visiting
journalist asks the coffee growers what they think of about Jhai
Foundation’s mission of reconciling American and Laotians. It is a
question about the war, of which all these men are veterans.
Bounheuang Keomany, another village leader, says, “The war
separated families and destroyed them. We try to forget that now. But when we
see the bombs, the bad memories and bad dreams all come back.”
Laos is littered with unexploded ordnance, or UXO.
Every year some 200 people are killed and two or three times that number maimed
by the explosives. A group clearing the land, called UXO Laos,
removed and destroyed about 80,000 pieces in 2001. The group needs an
estimated 20 to 30 more years to complete the job.
Nummula says, “The past is the past. We learned from the
experiences of the past. Now we look to the future for ourselves.”
Free-lance writer Dennis Coday lives in Bangkok,
Thailand.
National Catholic Reporter, February 7,
2003
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