From bananas to coffee beans in Yemen

Yesterday my taxi driver hailed from Yemen.

I always try to engage taxi drivers in conversation because you never know what they know. And so many are foreigners. Talking with cab drivers is like plunging into the National Geographic or the Oxford Research Encyclopedia.

We passed a garden that supported banana trees.

“Those banana trees need water,” my driver commented.

“How do you know that,“ I asked.

It turned out he had been a farmer in his homeland. This man looked back fondly on his life growing mocha coffee beans in the mountains and banana trees by the sea.

“Did you know, mocha beans come only from Yemen,” he said.

It has been 30 years since he’d been in his country because of the war there. All his family is here now. But I could see that he missed the life of a farmer in Yemen, missed growing his coffee beans and his bananas.