Roasting Coffee growing up

Growing up, i was always fascinated by new things or Adventures.....i was the 'Tomboy' of the homestead.
I have memories of designing an 'energy saving jiko' for my mother and 'building' it from scratch! You see the inspiration came from being so tired of fetching firewood....Anyway the jiko didnt last long, it got destroyed during a fight between me and my brother.....

After the jiko incident, i needed to keep my mind busy and then thats when i started roasting coffee on the 'rugio' ( a pan that is used in Kenya to make chapatis). How did i even come about the idea? My father is passionate about coffee. Our small coffee farm was and is still the best in the area...my brother used to say one can lie down in the nice made furrows and just go to sleep under the African clear blue sky....

One day me and my brother got so curious what would happen if we roasted the damn coffee! we waited till my parents went to church on a Sunday. Armed with our little ndebes we headed to the shamba and picked some coffee. In our childhood innocence we figured that if we threshed the coffee beans just like my mother threshed maize we would get the pulp out. The gods were on our sides; the community's pulping station is just 800 m from my home, so we actually had a vague idea about coffee processing.

Anyway its a long story, but in the end we had roasted cofffee; well it was something between coffee and charcoal ;)

Back then the idea of Chania Coffee was slowly forming, but i was still a child. I still had the whole world infront of me, i wanted to get drunk and party...... things became so difficult i remember swearing never to get married to a coffee farmer! Like my childhood friends, we swore to each other to 'get out' of the village! away from the coffee, away from the struggles, away from the poverty. We was tired....we had been robbed off our childhood! we spent hours and days picking the coffee, spent nights queing at the pulping stations (wet mills) to have our produce selected, weighed and logged.we wanted out...

Many years later, after spending 16 years without having picked a coffee bean; i came back. I came back to my people a wiser person, ofcourse i didnt marry the coffee farmer :D!!