It Happens Here: West Roxbury's Recreo Coffee on mission to help families in Nicaragua
WEST ROXBURY - Recreo Coffee is brewing up change in Boston with their original location on Centre Street in West Roxbury and a second one in the lobby of City Hall.
"Recreo means recreation, kind of like a break, a coffee break," Hector Morales told WBZ-TV.
He and his wife Miriam are the co-owners.
"We met in the 80s when we were at college. I was at Northeastern and my husband was at BU getting his doctorate," she told WBZ.
He's a physicist, she's an engineer.
Hector is from Puerto Rico and Miriam is from Nicaragua, which she fled as a girl during a civil war.
"My parents sent me to Miami to live with my aunt and that's where I started," she said.
Her mother and father stayed behind, working the family's coffee bean farm.
They're still there now and eventually Hector and Miriam had an idea.
"We started just selling little bags, setting up our tent and our table, and a customer there said this coffee is so good, why don't you open a coffee shop," she said.
And so they did.
"It's literally straight from the farm to the cup. And because it's only our coffee that we do, it's single-origin, there are no blends, so you can taste the farm basically in your cup," Hector said.
Even more beautiful is the mission. Hector and Miriam have turned the family farm in Nicaragua into a community of 40 families, with a school and health clinic, all supported by the proceeds here.
"We have a program also helping little girls go from elementary school all the way to college," Hector told WBZ.
"I just saw my parents sacrifice so much for it, and so now that I'm in this side, never thought that I would be, but now that I am helping and really seeing that we are making a difference over there, it is -- it's part of me and it's a joy," Miriam said.
For more information, visit their website.
