Since being home, I have been like a computer straining against its CPU to process data beyond its capacity. The frequency of updating this blog has suffered for it but I would much rather gain perspective and write something that is profitable to someone else than just spit out information as it tumbles out of my head. Given some time for decompression, I feel a greater grasp of what I just witnessed. Approaching it from the beginning seems best.
What is the Idea of Coffeeland Honduras and Where Did it Come From?
As a coffee professional, I have always wanted to “get to origin” and see how coffee is grown, processed and shipped. As a perpetual student this occurred to me as the natural progression of study for the purpose of understanding. I never did very well in school and found its structure counter-productive in both public and private institutions. My personal learning style is a process of interest leading to study, study leading to deeper research, research leading to people that are more advanced then myself and finally to personal experience with the subject. As a man of faith, this carries over naturally into my spiritual path – essentially, all true growth occurring beyond the intellectual plane and in experiential proof in relationship with people. For me, what I do and who I am (spiritually) is inseparable and exists simultaneously in daily life. Therefore, every time I learn a new concept and it matures into a new skill with my hands, what I can do and who I am expands.
All that culminates in a compulsion, more than just a desire, to get to origin and expand. Honduras became the focus of this first experience because a dear friend and regular customer at the shop has worked in rural Honduras for almost 14 years and asked if we could help in the area of coffee.
- our dear friend, Vaughn Drawdy
We here at Safehouse started working furiously to put together a plan that would be highly educational and highly profitable to the small village in which we would be working. Educational, not just for us but for as many other people as possible, whether that be through our pages online or actually coming along with us on future trips. With this in mind, we decided that a documentary series would be the highest impact medium to transfer the experience and content to others. We have made some videos in the past with very positive response from our friends and colleagues. Those videos ranged from the mildly educational to the outlandish but they were fun to make and served as a great creative outlet. They also happened to elevate awareness of our company in the specialty coffee industry, so that doesn’t hurt either and we have made a LOT of friends from it all. Nevertheless there is a chasm of difference between making tongue-in-cheek product reviews and shooting a documentary. We are not documentarians but we have yet to meet a subject we could not master. Documentaries are a particularly difficult format of film to achieve at a high level, as we are now learning. In the purpose of the series, one does not want to imbue the doc with dogmatism or make the story about one’s self (blogs are a much better venue for that). Sounds simple, but in the States we have all grown up in a society that relates everything in first person, making this project even more of a learning experience – but that leads us into the next post:
Coffeeland Honduras: Why Here?
- shooting video in the electricity-free village of Linares
