A Café for Our Campus
The original Ben Linder Café operated for several years in León, Nicaragua as a way to fund habilitation projects and provide employment for those profoundly injured by war. Survivors of the wars on both sides -- Sandinista and Contra -- agreed to name the café for the only U.S. citizen to have been killed in those wars, a civil engineer who was developing renewable energy projects in the coffeelands of Jinotega at the time of his death, April 28, 1987. Since its first Geography of Coffee travel course in 2006, more than 100 Bridgewater (Massachusetts) State University students have visited the site where Benjamin Linder was buried in honor in the city of Matagalpa. Several dozen of these have visited either the original café in León or the hydroelectric projects that Linder's colleagues continue to develop four decades after his death. Inspired by his legacy of service, those who have traveled to Nicaragua with the BSU program proposed that a café be built at BSU. The café wo