The Monk of Mokha

Mokhtar had grown up in San Francisco, surrounded by water—oceans and bays and rivers, estuaries and lakes. He’d spent years in Yemen, a country with a twelve-hundred-mile coast. He’d gone to middle school on Treasure Island, an actual island. But he’d never been on a boat. He’d always wanted to, but the ferries and yachts and sailboats he’d seen t

“Officer,” he said, “what if I told you that I’m an American citizen, and that we just came back from the State Department and the White House, where we were asked to speak? And after a day speaking to important people and feeling good about our democracy, now this will be my experience in D.C.? Because that’s what just happened. If Lincoln were al

about how Americans like Mokhtar Alkhanshali—U.S. citizens who maintain strong ties to the countries of their ancestors and who, through entrepreneurial zeal and dogged labor, create indispensable bridges between the developed and developing worlds, between nations that produce and those that consume. And how these bridgemakers exquisitely and brav

He wandered Sana’a that day, feeling trampled upon but then again free of the burden of dreams. He had had a dream, and dreams are heavy things, requiring constant care and pruning. Now his dream was gone, and he walked the streets like a man without anything to lose. He could do anything. He could do nothing.

Mokhtar had to get back to the United States. He needed to test the samples he’d collected—he planned to bring twenty-one lots home—and visit family and see about raising a few hundred thousand dollars so he could come back and actually buy the coffee, if any, that scored well.

He paid, and she gave him his new tickets, which bore the code that indicated they’d been singled out for extra screenings. “You know what?” he said. “You work in a racist institution. You should know about these things. I’ve been through four hours of screenings and I missed the flight. That’s why I’m here getting a new flight. And you’re putting

Apparently Khaldi was far afield with his sheep, allowing them to graze on any vegetation they could find. Every night he slept near them, and all was peaceful until late one night, when he expected them to be resting, he found that his sheep were still up and about. More than up and about—they were jumping, prancing, braying. Khaldi was mystified.

The only way Mokhtar could revive coffee in Yemen, then, was to raise the price paid for Yemeni coffee above that paid for qat. To do that, he had to deal directly with the farmers, and determine a price based on what he could get from international specialty roasters. And to garner a higher price from these specialty roasters, he had to drasticall

Any given cup of coffee, then, might have been touched by twenty hands, from farm to cup, yet these cups only cost two or three dollars. Even a four-dollar cup was miraculous, given how many people were involved, and how much individual human attention and expertise was lavished on the beans dissolved in that four-dollar cup. So much human attentio