Crappy Coffee Convictions

Yet another fun little remnant of our vacation is that we are now back on the caffeine. Sleep deprivation coupled with driving pushed us from caffeinated coffee into Starbucks DoubleShots and (for DH) Red Bull by the last day of our vacation. We were so desperate for coffee one morning that we assembled the beat up perk coffeemaker in the RV to make coffee, because we broke the SpaceMaker carafe while cleaning it (which we replaced, btw).

Anyhow, while on our trip we bought some Starbucks coffee at the "Food Round Up" or something equally cutesy in West Yellowstone, MT. They didn't have pre-ground coffee, though, so I had to use the store machine for grinding. That particular choice was a poor one, in hindsight, because clearly someone else had used the machine and hadn't ground up all their beans. I discovered this halfway through the bag, as the Starbucks house blend slowly gave way to the most vilely artificially raspberry flavored coffee I have ever tasted. It says something that we actually DRANK it while on vacation.

Now that we are back home however, it is squirreled away in the top of the coffee cupboard, to be reserved only for those times when we most desperately NEED COFFEE!! I hope we won't find ourselves needing it, because, dang, we are coffee SNOBS. No cheapy flavored robusta beans for us! Only good quality arabica that's well roasted, TYVM. Good coffee is like good wine--it spoils you for the cheap kind.

Of course, DH & I got into a great philosophical discussion last night sparked by the 100th episode of "Dirty Jobs". That show reminds me how darn blessed we are not to be the people who clean out septic tanks or pick up roadkill or do thousands of other nasty jobs. And of course we moved on to talk about third world countries and how dirty jobs are even more dangerous there because of the lax safety standards. I was reminded of a photoessay I saw in a magazine, about poverty around the world. One picture haunts me to this day, of a woman and her family (her children and her mother) who were living in a one room shack, I think in Bulgaria. And this woman used to be a prostitute until her kids begged her not to do it any more, and so she gave it up even though it meant that shack was all they could afford. They were so poor that they collected plastic bags and tied them up tightly to use as fuel for their fire, and they burned so dirtily that they were all covered (even the baby) in dark black soot. SO sad.

And here I sit, at my expensive laptop, complaining about cheap flavored coffee and putting out tons of cardboard for recycling when that woman and her family would be GRATEFUL to have cardboard to burn. Wow. The disparity is so incredible. I have a greater appreciation for what some friends of ours meant when they were saying they had a hard time supporting their church's multimillion dollar building campaign when a good friend of theirs was running an orphanage in Kenya on less than a thousand dollars a month. Their church has a perfectly good building, but they want to make some aesthetic changes, make it a little bigger, etc...and here their friend was paying a nurse $100 per month to come to the school & orphanage every day to check on the kids who were sick and provide care. Wow. That is a big difference...when literally pennies per day can feed someone, versus being a proverbial drop in the bucket for a comparatively wealthy church's building fund.

It does make me want to give more. I have a bunch of things for the food bank, but I just haven't bothered to put it all in the car and drop it off. Ditto some clothes for Goodwill. Hmmm. Talk about convicting! It's too easy to ignore the widows and orphans and complain about our own good fortune. I hope I can do a better job teaching our kids and reminding myself of our many blessings and sharing them with those in need. I suppose you could say that crappy coffee convicts hearts! Ha!