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His story is also about coffee, and about how he tried to improve coffee production in Yemen, where coffee cultivation was first undertaken five hundred years ago.
He was a Muslim Yemeni American, and she was half-Palestinian, half-Greek and a Christian.
So many labels.
Some Infinity residents knew his work as a young activist,
Community organizer?
the Yemenis were late arrivals emigrating in significant numbers in the 1960s, finding work primarily in the farms of California’s San Joaquin Valley and in the automotive factories of Detroit.
the library was the one place that was his own.
Libraries saving lives.
“It means that money is ephemeral, moving from person to person,” Hamood said. “It’s a tool. Don’t let it get into your heart or your soul.”
Not any Tenderloin kid. Some are just more ambitious. Mokhtar was ambitious and took full advantage of every opportunity including making opportunities.
The car cost the old man exactly what Li wanted to charge him. He’d taken $1,000 off the initial number, but he’d added it right back on. That made it easier to leave.
Mokhtar has a conscience.
The fuel never made a profit—no gas station can turn much of a profit on actual gas—but it brought people into the grocery, and that’s where the profits happened. Food, lottery tickets, liquor.
speaking Arabic at home, English in school, Spanish in the grocery.
The best multilinguals are those that actually have to use the languages.
He lost years to indecision, to inaction.
As have many of us. The thing is to make this up as soon as you realize you can make a change.
Justin wanted to be an olive importer. Justin Chen was a friend Mokhtar had made at UC Berkeley—one
She encouraged Mokhtar to be vocal. To be involved. She had no fear.
She did not have as much to loose. Makes one fearless.
the Hills brothers, Austin and R.W., who in the late 1800s set up a coffee-importing business called Arabian Coffee and Spice Mills.
Coffee was a fruit, from a tree, a tree that usually bloomed once a year, and inside each fruit was the coffee bean.
Yes, I have eaten the berries. My grandparents had a small farm.
Ali Ibn Omar al-Shadhili, a Sufi holy man living in Mokha, who first brewed the bean into a semblance of what we now recognize as coffee—then known as qahwa.
SWOT
SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.
Stole The wine of Islam. He strapped seven cherries to his belly ... In India, he planted the seeds ... from those millions of arabica plants flourished.
So in 1616, a Dutchman named Pieter van den Broecke,
Second Thief: The thief from Amsterdam. ... stole seedlings from Mokha and secreted them to Holland. ... Dutch colony of Ceylon and later to Java.
Gabriel de Clieu,
Third Thief: The French coffee thief. He stole coffee from Amsterdam to grow in the West Indies, Martinique.
These plants became the foundation of the Brazilian coffee industry, which by 1840 accounted for 40 percent of the world’s production.
Fourth Thief: Francisco de Melo Palheta, Lieutenant colonel in the Brazilian army under Portuguese control. Seduced the governor's wife, Marie-Claude de Vicq. ... she gave him coffee cherries.
By the twenty-first century, Americans were consuming 25 percent of the world’s coffee,
And I am not a contributor to that 25%.
Come to think of it, you have to make a choice. Are you a businessman or are you an activist? For now, at least, you have to pick one.”
Ghassan's advice to Mokhtar.
qat
the leaves of an Arabian shrub, which are chewed (or drunk as an infusion) as a stimulant. In the United States, cathinone is a Schedule I drug, according to the US Controlled Substance Act. The 1993 DEA rule placing cathinone in Schedule I noted that it was effectively also banning khat: ... In California, both the plant itself as well as cathinone, its active component, are illegal.
was this a very young dilettante, some kind of hustler, or the genuine article?
He's a bit of both. Dilettante: a person who cultivates an area of interest, such as the arts, without real commitment or knowledge.
Nothing like that had ever happened to Mokhtar.
But it happened twice. Many good things happened to Mokhtar. Lots of friends and family helped him.
There were various coffees with cheese—cheese dunked in a cup of hot coffee and later eaten when the mixture softly congealed.
Had this when I was very young. I liked the cheese part the most.
and sugar was added to the hot coffee—making
In Cuba it is very sweet. Celia Cruz says: AZUCAR!
The civet was expert at picking the ripest cherries to eat, and afterward, its feces were found to have done all the processing work usually requiring man and machine and much water.
Yucky and expensive.
Being a Q grader is something akin to what a sommelier is to wine, a grand master is to chess.
Okay. Coffee snob?
I grind the beans into a powder so they can dissolve in water.
But they don't dissolve.
In 2009, the mutilated bodies of two German nurses and a South Korean teacher were found, and these and other incidents underlined the marked difference between the Yemeni way and the way of al-Qaeda.
In the Arab way—make note of something, compliment anything, and it will be offered to you—Alemeri
Some hispanics do this as well.
He went on, explaining that the Dutch had stolen the seedlings, had planted them in Java and had given them to France, and the French had planted them in Martinique, and that the Portuguese had smuggled them from the French, had planted them in Brazil, and that now there was a seventy-billion-dollar market for coffee, that everyone seemed to be making money from the bean—everyone but the Yemenis, who had started the whole business in the first place.
The best summary ever!
The intentions of these aid workers and organizers were fine, sometimes unassailable, but the follow-through was inconsistent.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
But the runoff was not potable,
Something that happens sometimes without ill intent but must be corrected.
as an icebreaker, you can tell me a food that represents you and why.”
Paella? Because it's complicated and full of flavors.
It meant that the person before you was never out of your vision. That you kept them foremost in your mind.
"You're in front of my face."
On March 21, ISIS posted the names and addresses of all one hundred American military personnel in Yemen and encouraged its acolytes to kill them. These last U.S. personnel were evacuated on March 25, and the same day they left al-Anad, just north of Aden, the Houthis quickly seized the strategic military base.
There had been bizarre interrogations, accusations of Yemeni Americans changing their names, living in the U.S. under false identities.
This looks reasonable given the threat to USA military and citizens. Also, what does this have to do with the coffee? This part of the book is just stirring the sentimental pot.
It was more like the disorganized and irrational detentions common at American airports, the kind of detention that came from the officers feeling they’d been confronted with something beyond their immediate comprehension, something too unusual to simply allow.
Sounds like the best cause for detention.
He told them about his coffee, about the orders, about the ship coming.
Giving new meaning to the phrase: when my ship comes in.
ON JUNE 9, 2016, Port of Mokha coffee was made available for the first time at Blue Bottle coffee shops around the United States.
Black Gold: Wake Up and Smell the Coffee,
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0492447/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
