Francine Mukantarengwa is describing how she survived the genocide when my translator breaks down. "Fourteen people in my family were killed," she says. "The brother of the killer of my family — he hid me." At this point, the interpreter, a former fighter with Kagame's Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), starts weeping. I let Francine go. She'd already told me about her life after the genocide. "I was abandoned," she said. "I was alone and I had nothing." And now? "Now I have goats, I have two cows, I have built a house. I have 700 coffee trees. I'm even putting money in the bank."

Five years ago, no one had heard of Rwandan coffee. It sold for less than a quarter of some speciality coffees and it didn't take an agronomist to figure out why. "It tasted crap," Schilling said. "Worse. It tasted of potatoes." Schilling, 54, was tasked with reviving Rwandan agriculture for usaid. So with almost 40% of the country farming coffee — more than 3 million people — he became a coffee expert. The key to a good cup, he discovered, was processing and speed. The sooner and more expertly coffee cherries are processed — stripped, washed, sorted and dried — the better the coffee. In 2003, for $120,000, he built Rwanda's first coffee-washing station on a stream next to some farms in Maraba.

The results were spectacular. The station started producing not just good coffee, but great coffee. Schilling built three more stations. Buyers from Mercato, Intelligentsia and Costco — even a British microbrewer making coffee beer — began showing up. In March 2006, 5,000 Starbucks outlets in the U.S. began selling Rwandan coffee. In their brochure this year, coffee roasters Green Mountain described Rwanda as "the hottest emerging origin in speciality coffee.

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