Rwanda and Rwandan Coffee - Impressions – March 20-31st, 2006
By Pete Rogers

• Very impressed. It’s a beautiful country with very proud and hard working people. No matter what a person did for a living they seemed proud of their work and the country.
• Very clean and safe. I saw no guns, trash in the streets, nice cars people dressed very nicely and beautiful houses. Even the poorer housing looked very nice compared to most of the Central American countries I have visited.
• A country made up of small farmers, rice, cattle, coffee, bananas, and milk. These hard working and extremely generous families are the backbone of the country.
• Women run many businesses in Rwanda and run them very well. Women were in charge of the best coffee farms and mills I visited.
• Rwanda is a country of small farmers – the average farm size is 150 trees that produce about 100 lbs of green coffee.
• In Rwanda, coffee processing mills are called “washing stations.” In other parts of the world they are called “wet mills.”
• The coffee farms need to focus on improving the quality of their coffee trees – through shade canopies where possible and through ideally, organic matter fertilization and organic composting.