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Beans. They’re a truly magical fruit. From an early age you can recite that silly rhyme. Years later, you discover there are, in fact, scarier beans than green beans. Kidney! Adzuki! Pinto! Even beans that look like chicken carcasses but are oh so tasty! And then you live in England and beans⎯though you avoid them at first⎯become your new daily breakfast companion. (Me? Desecrate the taste of bread? With baked beans? Ohh yeah.) You might be slurping down some beans right now if you’re drinking coffee. But enough with my nonsense, let’s talk about Community’s beans. If you have a question about something else related to the Baton Rouge area, send them to me here. Appreciate it.

Question: Where does Community Coffee come from?

Answer: More places than I’ve visited.

I’m not trying to flash my virtual passport here, but I’ve been to 10 countries not counting all the ones I’ve “visited” in Epcot Center. (Through my father’s famous words on an unseasonably freezing Florida day, “I’m going to France.”) Only one country on my list, Mexico, matches with the far-flung locales Community Coffee works with for its coffee supply. Internationally, Community gets its beans from 13 different origins (countries or places). When Community started buying its first green coffee more than 40 years ago, it turned to Brazil, which is now its main supplier. In rank of supply after Brazil, you’ve got Mexico and then Guatemala and Colombia. Other coffees come from Indonesia, Sumatra, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Kenya and most of the Central American countries.

Community started buying coffee from Rwanda Co-op farmers in 2002 through a USAID-funded program, Partnership of Enhancing Agriculture in Rwanda through Linkages (PEARL). Gemima Mukashyaka, one of the program’s farmers, toured the Community Coffee roasting facility in Port Allen and visited the original CC’s Coffee House in New Orleans earlier this month. Community annually purchases a container of coffee (40,000 pounds) from the Abahuzamugambi Co-op in the Maraba district of Rwanda, Mukashyaka’s home.

Fellow blogger, Brandi Simmons, and I had the opportunity/privilege/media perk of joining Mukashyaka on the tour and listening to her stories as told and translated through her native Kinyarwanda. After a childhood incident of “I drink Coca-Cola in coffee cups and AGH! That’s not Coca-Cola,” I tend to stay away from coffee. Yet I’m drawn to it now after hearing how something as simple as a bean can help a woman, a family and a country. You can read Brandi’s account of the tour here. If you have a password for the online version of The New York Times, you can click here to read more about Mukashyaka.

If you don’t want to do any of that, well shame on you. I’m not awestruck or sappy all too often, so when I’m sitting at this keyboard spilling my lovely guts to you, telling you this one woman’s story has made me weep repeatedly and thoroughly question my life’s purpose … well, you better start clicking. If you don’t have a nytimes.com password, e-mail me here and I’ll send you the article. If you think I should seek professional help because a single two-hour encounter with a Rwandan woman makes me want to quit journalism and start farming with sustainable practices, well you’re wrong. This is my journey and I’ll forge my own path, thanks. (And no, faithful readers, this isn’t a roundabout resignation blog. I just have some thinking to do, that’s all.)

Thanks to Joyce Harper at Community Coffee for grinding my questions down to delicious answers. Also many thanks to Community in general for the tour. And while I’m feeling warm and fuzzy, thanks to all of you who take the time every week to learn something through little ole me.