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" As a coffee man, I&amp;#039;ve grown accustomed to seeing the harder parts of the human experience: crippling poverty, injustice, disease, death and disaster, and other things that might not be printed on your coffee cup but nevertheless surround it in some form or another. Genocide in Rwanda, the aftermath of thirty years of conflict in Angola, the pancaked buildings in Haiti, the street children of central and South America \u2014 all problems in coffee-producing places. These things are part of a coffee man&amp;#039;s life, the unwelcome part of the greater picture. Sleeping in makeshift shelters and under trucks is sometimes a part of that experience, because more often than not there&amp;#039;s little room for a tall, odd, bald American coffee-roaster to sleep. But in the Midwest right now, some 800 meters from where a Target once stood, it&amp;#039;s an altogether different experience. Tonight I&amp;#039;ll sleep under a tarp, one edge of it duck-taped to the side of my truck. Around it lay the scattered pieces of what was once Joplin, Missouri, and although this is not Monrovia in the early nineties, it feels very much like it, as if God in some drunken state played a horrible game of pick-up sticks with it. No, coffee is not grown here, nor is this the hub of culinary coffee-loving America. But it is a place that the humble seed, infused with water, may be most needed. I once heard a phrase that sticks with me to this day, and I&amp;#039;m remembering it as I pick through the rubble to make room for my generator and coffee-brewer: &amp;quot;If you don&amp;#039;t know what to do, just do something.&amp;quot; For me, like most of us, that something often means donating a check, to the Red Cross or a similar entity \u2014 someone whose job it is to right the wrong, to make it all better. But today, for me, that something is also coffee. I&amp;#039;m waiting for my brewer to warm, with photos of unknown family members of the people of Joplin blowing past my feet, as the surviving residents try to rebuild their town and their lives. I didn&amp;#039;t know what to do, so I&amp;#039;m going to do something: brew these people the best coffee the world can muster. Much of this coffee, it&amp;#039;s worth noting, comes from Rwanda, Haiti, Angola, and Brazil. Todd Carmichael is the co-founder of La Colombe Torrefaction and the first American to cross Antarctica to the South Pole alone on foot. Read more from Todd Carmichael&amp;#039;s regular coffee column for Eat Like a Man &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/food-drink/a10064/joplin-visit-060311/>