God in a Cup by Michaele Weissman

Author:Michaele Weissman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Published: 2011-03-16T04:00:00+00:00

It is after 9:00 p.m. when we arrive at our destination, an ecotourist hotel called the Aregash Lodge, which is built deep in the forest to resemble a traditional Sidamo village with individual huts to accommodate the guests. We wake before sunrise to the distant sound of Christian prayer—it’s Coptic Lent—and the faithful in a nearby village have gathered outdoors to chant before dawn. A few minutes later we hear Muslim prayer, from a different village. When we exit our huts, wrapping sweaters around ourselves, we smell the frankincense and Queen of the Night growing wild around our little thatched dwellings. It occurs to me that I have never been in a place that smells so good before. And has so many birds. Maybe Peter and Geoff weren’t overly romanticizing Yirgacheffe when they called it Eden.

The morning air is chilly, but we eat breakfast outdoors. White-faced colobus monkeys with comically long, white tails hiding high up in the distant trees try to catch a glimpse of us as we try to get a glimpse of them. Lindsey claps her hands and shouts to the maids serving breakfast, “Buna. Buna, buna.”

“This is a crazy place,” Kim says. “I felt huge spirits last night in our hut. I thought lightning had hit us. I thought I’d been electrocuted. I heard animals—all this energy being stirred up…”

“Jackals and hyenas come out at night,” Shirin says.

It’s like there’s a hallucinogenic up here, someone says.

“I felt a pulsation of energy in the air,” says Lindsey.

The guys have gone walking in the forest. It’s just the girls who seem to be going Druid—Lindsey, Libby, Kim, and Shirin, but not me. I am not much into this moon goddess stuff, but maybe I spend too much time in Washington, D.C.

I look at the other women. Shirin is on the short side, but the other three are tall and spare. I can’t help wondering if there is some sort of self-selection going on, whether the kind of women who are attracted to the coffee trade tend to be like this—lean and leggy. All of them are athletes. Shirin is a horsewoman and polo player. In Singapore, she rode horseback every morning. In the afternoon she played polo, and she wears a “stick chick” T-shirt. Shirin says she had her final job interview with Peet’s on her cell phone while on horseback. Kim, the photographer, with her wide smile, wild hair, and rangy body, hikes and skis and bikes—if it’s dangerous, she’s into it. Libby, the daughter of two forest rangers, was an Olympic-caliber equestrian until she broke her back riding. “I loved the competition, but I hated the snootiness of the horse world, so upper class. Now I just ride my bike,” she says. Lindsey was a competitive rower in college, also with Olympic aspirations. She got pretty close to that goal and then discovered that she didn’t have a killer instinct.

“The day I quit rowing was the happiest day of my life. I didn’t want to attack my teammates for spots on the national team.

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