A cool breeze rustles through the bamboo slats of the quaint coffee-house, as the mid-afternoon sun begins its slow descent into dusk. Outside, the sky is blue, and the coffee trees in the fields below sway gently in the light wind.

We’re standing in a semi-circle in a red-dirt yard, sipping hot coffee blossom tea, and before us is a towering Akha tribal version of Thor, wielding a gigantic 4-foot wooden pestle. The enemy is a huge mound of thick, sticky white gooey-ness, sitting nonchalantly in a hollowed-out tree-trunk-turned-mortar.