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brother coffee gourmet Guide
brother coffee gourmet
Genocide-torn nation banking on coffee exports
PORT ALLEN, La. -- Coffee grown in Rwanda, an increasingly popular gourmet item, is helping the African nation recover economically and socially from the genocide that killed hundreds of thousands in the 1990s, a Rwandan grower said Thursday. Gemima Mukashyaka, director of Rwanda's Maraba coffee growers cooperative, toured the Community Coffee Co. roasting plant just outside Baton Rouge. Privately held Community buys about 20 percent of the cooperative's annual bean output, mostly for its gourmet coffee blends, said company chairman Norman Saurage. "Rwandan beans are in the top 1 percent in quality among the world's beans," Saurage said. "It's nearly an exotic experience." Mukashyaka, 28, is running her family's coffee plantation in southwest Rwanda after her mother, five brothers and four sisters were killed in that country's 1994 civil war in which more than 500,000 minority Tutsis were killed by Hutu extremists over 100 days.
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