From Our Founder

My paternal grandmother lived in the hills of northern Rwanda, where some of the finest coffee on earth grows in volcanic soil, high above the clouds. She gave me my name. Umunyana, in Kinyarwanda, means something you see once in a lifetime, something that brings you luck.

I never got the chance to grow up knowing her. She was one of the victims of the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi, which I survived as a small child. I wrote a book about those years, and I have spent my life speaking about them so they are not forgotten. But her name carried me through all of it. I grew up believing I was lucky, believing I was blessed, and that belief shaped everything I have done and everyone I have become. This company is about what grows after. And what grows after, in her hills, is coffee.

Here is the strange thing about Rwandan coffee: for most of a century, almost no one who grew it ever drank it. Under colonial rule our grandparents were made to farm coffee for export. It was planted under obligation, harvested under obligation, and shipped away. Rwanda became a country of coffee farmers who drink tea. That is the house I grew up in. Tea in the morning, milk for the children, and our coffee somewhere out in the world, wearing our soil.

Then one day in Kigali, I walked past a cafe at the genocide memorial and stopped. A smell I could not name was reaching down the street to meet me, warm and dark and alive. It was coffee. Our coffee, roasted and poured in Rwanda, for Rwandans, for nearly the first time. I fell in love with the smell before I had ever tasted a cup.

I moved to the United States in 2014 and learned coffee the way you learn a new language, badly at first. At an airport coffee counter I asked for it the only way I could drink it then, half milk and half coffee. What I said was "half and half." What they handed me was a cup of cream. I sipped it, confused, an ocean from home, holding a cup with no coffee in it at all.

But I kept going, and coffee became mine. And I noticed that no cafe here ever smelled like that street in Kigali. I kept walking into coffee shops looking for that smell and walking out without it.

So I stopped looking and started roasting.

Umunyana Coffee buys directly from women farmers in Rwanda's northern highlands, the hills where my grandmother lived, where coffee was once grown under obligation and is now grown with ownership, the farmers paid first. We roast in small batches in Los Angeles, days before shipping, so what reaches you still carries that smell. Even if you never brew a cup, grind it in your kitchen and you will understand. It brings calm. It brings peace. It smells like the most beautiful place I know.

My grandmother's name taught me to feel lucky, and that is what I want this coffee to do. When you find Umunyana, I want you to feel what the name means. Lucky. Blessed. Certain that another day is coming, and that it will be beautiful.

I can bring home here, anywhere I go.

Nothing but Kindness.

— Dydine