Coffee as my connection to Madagascar

My connection with Madagascar—and, in many ways, with Malagasy coffee—began when I arrived as a Peace Corps volunteer in 2003.

After nine weeks of language training, I was sent to my village.

Getting there required an hour-and-a-half flight from the capital, followed by a seven-hour bus ride. By the time I arrived, I was in a completely different region of the country, where the dialect was very different from the Malagasy I had spent the previous nine weeks learning.

I was excited. This was the adventure I had signed up for.

I was also terrified.

In those first weeks, simply finding the courage to leave my house could take a lot of mental self-talk. Everything was unfamiliar. I could not communicate well. Every small interaction required concentration, and every mistake felt enormous.

I was also the only foreigner in my village. I was the center of attention. Everyone knew what I did. If I paid too much for tomoatoes in the market. My neighbor would already know (and scold me) by the time I arrived home. It was life under a microscope.

I needed a reason to go outside each morning.

Coffee became that reason (or the excuse).

One Conversation, Three Times

Every morning, I would leave my house to buy some bread and have a coffee.

The coffee vendors had simple roadside stalls with flat wooden benches. There would almost always be two, three, or four people sitting there already.

The vendor was there, of course, but the rest of the group changed constantly. It might include someone returning from the market, a visitor passing through town, a local official, a farmer, or someone who had simply stopped for a coffee and a conversation.

Malagasy culture is incredibly warm and welcoming. A conversation often begins with a greeting "Inona no vaovao? Inona no miresaka?" that roughly means: What is the news? What is the talk?

The traditional response might be that there is "Tsy misy vaovao" or there is no news. But, of course, there was always something going on.

People were harvesting rice.

The mangoes were ripe.

It was market day and the onion price had gone up-.

Someone had lost a cow—or had one stolen.

A visitor had arrived in town or the students had come back for vacation.

There was always something happening.

I would sit down at the first stall, exchange greetings, and then work very slowly through a conversation.

At that stage, every sentence required effort. I would listen carefully, try to understand, and build my response piece by piece. In parallel, writing new vocabulary in a notebook to reference later.

When I finished my coffee and bread, I would pay, get up, and walk about 100 meters to the next coffee stand.

Then I would try to have the same conversation again. Trying to remember the vocabulary and referencing the notebook when I would get stuck.

After that, I would go to a third stand and repeat it one more time.

The first conversation might be painfully slow. The second would be slightly easier. By the third, I could sometimes make it sound as though I knew what I was doing.

This became my language-learning strategy.

But it also became much more than that.

A Community Built Around a Bench

I learned early that there is something special about the community that formed around those coffee stalls.

The vendor was always there and was usually happy to have a guest. The people sitting on the benches might have very little in common beyond the fact that they had stopped for coffee at the same time.

But for those few minutes, everyone was part of the same conversation.

A person with money might sit beside someone with almost none. A mayor could sit with a farmer. A resident of the village might share the bench with someone who had just arrived from another town.

Everyone was served.

Everyone listened.

Everyone spoke.

Coffee was an equalizer.

There was no formal invitation and no need to organize anything. You sat down, ordered a coffee, and entered the life of the community.

For me, those conversations became a way into Madagascar. As a visitor, I could 'plug into' the coffee culture to be part of the daily conversation. 

I learned the language there, but I also learned how people shared information, how humor worked, how news traveled, and how a community made space for someone who was clearly new and struggling.

The people at those stalls were extraordinarily patient with me. They slowed down. They repeated themselves. They laughed with me when I made mistakes, and occasionally at me—which was also fair.

Then, the next morning, we began again. 

More Than the Coffee in the Cup

Long before Madagascar Coffee Company existed, coffee was already teaching me something important.

Coffee is never only a product.

It is a place.

It is a ritual.

It is the person serving it, the people sharing the bench, and the conversation that begins with a simple question:

What is the news?

For me, Malagasy coffee began there—on a wooden bench, at a roadside stall, trying to find the courage and the words to become part of a community. And every morning, the community welcomed me.