The Pili is an amazing thing.
It’s the hottest pepper in Burundi and Rwanda, and I’m sure Kenya Congo, and Tanzania. I didn’t have it in Sudan, so I don’t know. Some had said it’s the hottest pepper on the earth, trumping those from India and Ethiopia.
Stumptown coffee is the best coffee in the world. Few would argue with that. Actually, just Matt G, Inteligencia, and Counter Culture. But it’s just an argument, that won’t go anywhere.
Stumptown is the best. One of my good buddies is the green coffee buyer for stumptwon coffee. Many who know the higher echelons of coffee know him.
Aleco Chigounis.
He travels the world in search of the best coffee bean. He’s intelligent, assessable, and fantastic and everyone in Burundi loves him. He comes to stay with Trina and I in Bujumbura, bringing us a great variety of stumptowns finest, and then he visits the northern coffee fields of Burundi.
He also likes to disappear here, where cell phones rarely work, and internet is almost dial up on it’s fastest days, electricity comes and goes, so does the water. But the sun sets everyday over the mountains of congo, the lake calls you all day to it’s shores, Burundians shuffle around doing a myriad of subsistence activities and the African sun beats down on you relentlessly when the African rains take some time off.
It’s lush, beautiful, wild, and untamed. And those who want to live life, come here to begin the living… there’s about 40 of us… and we love it. One of the things Aleco and I do every time he comes besides drinking great coffee, working out, swimming, hanging, and eating like Bazungu African king’s is… we both eat the amazingly painful pili pepper. It’s one of the most pleasure-full and pain-full things one can do in Burundi.
It’s a sacred thing, and a spiritual experience. It’s forged our friendship in the fiery depths of the heart of the dark continent. It burns hotter than radiation, and then sends a massive, euphoria straight to your head. Nobody else really believes that I’m telling the truth because they’re too afraid to try the pili in it's natural form. I think Aleco and I may be the only two people who actually eat the pepper itself. It’s typically crushed into a pulp, then bottled, then used in extreme moderation in large meals. I don’t know any Burundians who eat pili pili even in its sauce form. I know a few bazungu who do, but they barely use any pili sauce at all. These series of photos chronicles the morning of the most recent pili worship.
My friend brando often watches us while we partake in the dance of the pili, he just laughs, but this time he took photos. We had the pili with our breakfast and I ate half of my breakfast before I teared into the pili. Once you begin pili consumption you loose all sense of taste for the next 30 minutes (indeed some have died). You can only taste the fantastic depths of the pepper itself… then you burn.
Then a pili high.
Then more burn.
Pili high.
Then the burn eases off, little by little. You begin to remember where you are, who you are, and a renewed sense of purpose in life surfaces from somewhere behind the frontal lobe.
