The Masqurade

As much as I love coffee what I really enjoy is tea time. Yes tea time in Botswana is 10am and afternoon tea is 3pm. This, my friends, is what I call civilization. The only less than genteel aspect of Batswana culture is a freeze dried substance called Ricoffee. Ricoffee is an instant coffee, or so it leads you to believe. By naming itself Ri-coffee it is masquerading as coffee, but Tatum knows the truth of the matter—it is in fact, 60% chicory thus making it instant chicory. By sheer ratio of coffee to chicory, it should be categorized as instant chicory, not coffee. Nestle, which owns Ricoffee, can’t pull the wool over my eyes. In Botwana, you can only find coffee in the capital and the tourist regions and it costs a fortune. The same applies for cheese, but that’s another blog. More often than not, tea time involves comely china tea cups and saucers with roses or some other European flora painted on them. The most popular types of tea are Five Roses and Reiboos. Five Roses however, is my tea of choice. As far as I’m concerned the only tea worth drinking is the heavily caffeinated tea and Reiboos is decaffeinated. Reiboos is affectionately referred to as “bush tea,” and I still haven’t quite figured out if “bush tea” is a reference to the tea leaves that are perhaps gathered from a bush, or if it’s an allusion “the bush---as in the outback, or the wilderness. I’ll keep investigating. What I do know for certain is that Five Roses has sponsored every church in Botswana. Most churches have a sign out front that reads “Five Roses” in the right margin and is decorated with the Five Roses logo; the church name and denomination are usually printed in bold letters on the remaining portion of the sign.
I add two Five Roses tea bags to my delicate china cup and smother them in full cream milk. Meanwhile I dream of coffee during tea time. I’m a star crossed lover, caught between two worlds. I imagine myself like Mariah Carey in her “We Belong Together” music video, running out on her prim, well established fiancé (in this case, a thinly veiled symbol for my relationship with tea time…so thinly veiled in fact, that I’m explaining it in a long parenthetical interjection) and my true love, coffee, who gives me a proper caffeine fix every time and leaves me satisfied. Although I can have a proper tea in Southern Africa, what I really want is a disposable paper cup complete with a wasteful plastic top to gush out a wellspring of sweet black gold, Texas tea, bonafide coffee, sweet nectar of the Ethiopian Sidamo, Columbian, or French Roast Gods. As much as I enjoy tea time, what I really love, is coffee.

The moral of this vignette?
Please send coffee to the following address. I’m desperate:

Tatum Little/Gomolemo PCV
Private Bag 005
Good Hope, Botswana

Enable my caffeine addiction and I’ll love you forever. Thank you.