Coffee Story: Ethiopia Available Now, Needed Now

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It's a big day for me today. It's the day Coffee Story Ethiopia comes out, and moreover it is the day I get to thank everyone who has helped support and create this amazing project. We've done it.

This morning a friend asked me to write her a note about why I wrote this book-- where did this passion come from? she asked. This is what I told her: I was drawn to write about coffee because I saw the impact of writing about adventure and climbing in Ethiopia-- and moreover I saw people's responses to a thicker and more complicated way to understand Ethiopia. Climbing was something me and my team brought to Ethiopia in 2007 (ie the technical systems, difficulty, etc); coffee is something that is Ethiopia.

I believe all of us want to understanding things more and feel more connected vis a vis an understanding that is not intellectual but is rather guttural-- we want to care. I saw these connections with writing and speaking about the adventure in Ethiopia and saw interest even further piqued when I would talk about coffee. And then I got it: One tenth more understanding about Ethiopia coffee could change the economic reality for a country that is trying its damnedest to no longer be one of the poorest in the world. How could I not create conversation to further that?

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The Biggest Job I've Ever Had

A boy in the Ethiopian Flag in Northern Ethiopia, Photo By Travis Horn Five years ago a taxi driver in Addis Ababa told me that the book I was about to write chronicling climbing in Ethiopia would save Ethiopia. I’d just explained to him what rock climbing was the minute before. Nevertheless he was convinced and I nodded and smiled as if I were as well.

When that taxi driver told me my book would save Ethiopia I took his statement at face value: write book =  save Ethiopia. Who knows what he really meant. I’ve never seen him since and don’t know his name. What I do know is that Vertical Ethiopia came out a year later and I spent that year and the two years following learning that I was indeed trying to save Ethiopia. But not just Ethiopia -- Ethiopia, myself, the United States, and the world....  

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The Ballad You Forgot, An Additive Adventure Entry

A young student showing off his artistic side with the rest of his class at one of imagine1day's schools

A blog in conjunction with Osprey Packs and Outside Television.

Let’s get this out of the way. I was 8. I made bad choices like singing Don’t Fence Me In at my father’s second wedding and lying down on the carpet in the school loft; I had bad choices foisted upon me, like a two-inch buzz cut—billed as a smart fashion move with the added benefit of being easier to treat lice (the loft). No wonder I felt sorry for the people in Ethiopia.

My older sister terrorized me, I had a boy hair cut, and glasses. They were starving, being relocated 400 miles away from their families and heritage, and in the middle of one of the most militaristic regimes in modern Africa called The Red Terror. I did what any person feeling a great sense of connected persecution would do. I wrote a ballad.

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Available at an Ethiopian Bookstore Near You—Vertical Ethiopia, and a Porsche.

After almost three months, Vertical Ethiopia finally landed in Addis for distribution. The first print run happened all at the same time (that’s what makes it a print run) and on February 14th, half of the books were loaded onto a plane from Dubai to Amsterdam to New York to Chicago, where some got on a truck to me in Denver and the rest on to my distributor in Houston. I had them in hand on the 21st. The other half was going to go by sea to Addis. Addis is less than 1600 miles from Dubai. It took the books eighty days to travel that distance, the majority of which time they were hanging out in Djibouti, waiting to be cleared for import and export. It took that long. It should not have. But that’s what happens these days in that part of the world sometimes.  

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Two Weeks In

There’s the retired schoolteacher who spent four years, or two stints, in the Peace Corps in southern Ethiopia. He remembers the people. The food. The peace.

The young woman who traveled overland from Kenya and to the Red Sea, across the contested boarder in the back of jeep, just to see if she could. She wants to know how to buy coffee directly from the source. She cannot seem to shake the taste of the thick Ethiopian brew.

The Ethiopian man from Wollo. He’s been here in the US longer than he was in Ethiopia. He says his children are American, he is not.

The 18-year old boy, a ski bum for the winter with hopes of African intrigue with a woman who called him from Egypt. They’re meeting in Addis.

The consummate traveler whose never tried to climb but grasps my book with both hands and asks if I know how she could start.

They all turn the pages of my book and stop on different images and stories so that the entire sea of my life and work for the past year is laid out before me. I had not understood how my extroversion could work as a writer. Maybe it’s like this.