Markham Nolan | Literary Mercenary

I’m a coffee drinker, you see. Black, two sugars. I have been for a long, long time, and had my most intense cup of coffee back in 2001.

The beans were grown, picked, dried and roasted within 100 metres of where I drank the coffee, in a small house on the lower slopes of Kilimanjaro. I had gone out to volunteer for a small Tanzanian NGO, a wide-eyed soft-palmed child of south county Dublin, naive to the ways of the world. And when I asked for coffee, someone came with a sandcastle bucket full of beans and boiled some grounds in a pot. I didn’t sleep for 36 hours.

But the intensity wasn’t just in the heavy shot of caffeine or the syrupy black aroma, it was in the back story.

In that village of Kilema, near Moshi, I met a man called Henry. Henry was in his seventies, a well-spoken Tanzanian man from the Chagga tribe, who had returned to Kilema after a working life in Dar Es Salaam. Henry had worked in the ministry of finance in Tanzania, and had a greater grasp on macroeconomics, or any economics, for that matter, than I did. I had just finished three displeasing years of law and had escaped my life in Ireland for a jaunt in Tanzania.

As we drank coffee that would blind a heavyweight wrestler, Henry told me about his farm. It was meant to be his pension, a small holding of a few acres on which he grew coffee, the local cash crop . Only the cash crop wasn’t bringing in what it used to. In fact, Henry had reverted to barter, subsistence farming. Coffee yields were down. In their heyday, the fields were producing twice what they now gave up each harvest. From the days of more, more, more, when farmers were encouraged to use poisonous amounts of fertiliser to sate western demand for dark little beans, things had changed. Back then, demand for coffee was high, but supply was lower than it now is. Vietnam had yet to get into the coffee-growing game, and Brazil was producing only a fraction of  what it now puts out. Prices were high.

And organic farming had yet to make an impact. So the chemicals were poured on, stripping the land of its innate fertility to produce more yields, more often. Biodiversity suffered, snakes near disappeared, but no matter. They were churning out the arabica beans to beat the band, and the money was rolling in.

But then Vietnam started doing the same, and the price of a bag of coffee dropped by half. And then we westerners said ‘we want organic’ which meant that fertiliser had to go.

Crops dropped by a quarter as the bleached soil took time to recover from years strung out on heavy chemicals.

Acre for acre, the land was now producing one dollar for every eight it had coughed up at the peak. And Henry, God love him, had retired to meet with a coffee-growing recession, and found himself selling bananas to neighbours to stay alive.

Clichéd as it may seem, I think of Henry’s story nearly every time I buy a bag of coffee. And in a month’s time, I’ll be back on Kilimanjaro again, among the coffee trees, to see how things have changed. Or if they’ve changed at all.

Just a very short note to mention a documentary showing at the IFI this Sunday. Blind Man Walking features Mark Pollock (pictured), the blind adventurer that just won’t quit. I met Mark while doing a feature on him ahead of his race to the South Pole, in which he became the first blind man to reach the bottom of the world on foot. He had previously run several ultra-marathons including the Everest Marathon, the Gobi March and other unmentionably long endurance races. Blizzards and white-out conditions meant little to him because he couldn’t see anyway, he said.

We hit it off, and after he got back, and I’d shifted a business, we started working together on some things including sponsorship pitches, his website, revamping the copy and figuring out the best way for Mark to begin using social media to further his business, despite his blindness. Like everything, he took to it like the proverbial duck, and was tweeting away no end once he got his mitts on an iPhone. Himself and Mick Liddy, with whom he did the Round Ireland yacht race earlier this year, videoblogged their race and the prep for as long as they had battery, all of which is stashed on the team’s facebook page, here.

The documentary will be screened without Mark being present, however, due to a fall he sustained not long after finishing the Round Ireland. Mark’s currently battling away in physio in the UK with his usual can-do outer skin on, just taking every day as it comes, surmounting challenges as they appear. It’s in his nature.

The doco was shot by Ross Whitaker, an award-winning Irish filmmaker and a good friend of Mark’s, and he’ll be doing a Q&A session after the event, which should be interesting. Mark has a capability to talk and talk and talk without any noticeable pause, which makes editing film of him in flow a real challenge. When I made a short intro film for their Round Ireland challenge (below the fold) I had to tell Mark to shut up and stick to the script. Repeatedly. I needed short, snappy, editable soundbites, not ineresting but meandering philosopical observations. That, apparently, was the style that Ross encouraged when Mark was doing diary pieces for the documentary. But they had an hour to fill. I had four minutes.

I watched Mark as he took on the challenge of the Round Ireland, dealing, in a very short timeframe, with the multiple challenges of sponsorship, equipment, and the little challenge of learning to sail from scratch. All the while, he was self-analyzing and seeking out any tiny opportunity for personal growth, and relating fresh obstacles to ones he’d conquered in the past. It was an impressive show, and a small challenge in comparison to walking to the South Pole. And no doubt, rendered in glossy imagery on a big screen, Blind Man Walking will bring all that to life.

Go BOOK IT.

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When I left Ireland to go travelling in 2006, Ireland’s property boom was at its giddy height. People were shitting themselves that if they didn’t buy now, they’d never own a house and end up living under a bridge or, worse yet, with their parents. They were racing each other to get on the property ladder, outbidding the next dupe for grab-bag cardboard box houses in satellite towns a poxy commute from Dublin. (You can see these developments now in Guardian features on Ireland’s ghost-towns – bus tours are imminent). I had no money, and no intention of trying to stretch what I had to buy a malodorous little hutch on the fringe of society, valued at its weight in gold.

So I filled my backpack, my girlfriend did the same, and we headed for South America. Of course, we couldn’t resist the lure of the ladder for long. In Bariloche, Argentina, we did the numbers. And we bought a tent (pictured). Here’s an edited version of our bitchy little missive home.

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After two months on the road, we were beginning to feel like escape artists. Our friends are back home, joining Ireland´s fastest-growing club, Club Property Ladder, and we are off here with nothing to our name but two backpacks so full they are screaming for mercy. But we got nervous.

So we did the mature thing. We invested in a home. Nothing flash, you understand; with the market being the way it is we first-time buyers can´t be choosy. We just reckoned that now is the time to get our foot on the ladder, so that in three years’ time we can trade up for an extra three square feet, three feet nearer Dublin´s city centre, and feel really smug, and maybe even rub it in the noses of people who were a few months later than us and can´t afford to make the jump just yet. Peasants.

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For the last few years I’ve been a solid lurker on the boards.ie photography forum, which is a profound source of photographic help, information, inspiration and the rest.

Rain from Markham Nolan on Vimeo.

Marooned as my garden office temporarily became an island, I got out the camera and started shooting out the door in frustration.

Good thing I didn’t have a gun to hand. Nerdy details over the fold.

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There’s an aul saying that football isn’t life and death – it’s much more important than that. It’s a lazy cliché, but with the post-mortem of Africa’s first world cup, many will toot their horn, saying that football could be responsible for breathing new life into the continent.

In a bar on Friday night, a friend told me how he was amazed at the ubiquity of football when he was working in Ghana, where every flat patch of dust became a soccer pitch, and anything solid and spherical was used as a ball. Football was everywhere, a complete leveller.

The picture above is a genuine African life-and-death soccer situation. The flat patch was, at one stage, the bottom of a dam near the village of Kilema, a coffee & banana plantation area on the lower slopes of Tanzania’s Mount Kilimanjaro. The dam was drained after a tragic death where a young boy fell into the waters and drowned, and a separate, safer, area was set aside further uphill for storing water.

The dam floor had been flattened by sediment, and after drainage it became a grassy, level clearing. What was abandoned due to death came alive again as soon as a set of posts were set up, and every evening we were there, the old dam would fill with kids playing soccer until the light faded.  The ball was knackered, the leather worn to scrubby suede, and turning up with a puncture kit and a pump made a Californian friend of mine a local hero.

That’s all I got on this topic, I’m no soccer fan. But I am a fan of Jessica Hiltout’s marvellous video series created ahead of the World Cup. One is embedded here. Go find the rest.

Joy Is Round from THE AMEN PROJECT on Vimeo.

(A.K.A. The Feature No-One Wanted)

Meet Barry Canton. Barry works in a dull-looking warehouse on the Boston shipyards. It’s beside a large dry dock where they raise cruise liners from the water to scrape off barnacles and repaint their undersides. On the opposite side of the dry dock is a tatty warehouse built by the US military. Its lifts are strong enough to take Humm-Vees to the fifth floor, but all it houses nowadays are artists and artisans, who unwittingly look across the dock at part of America’s energy revolution. Unassuming Barry from Sutton is part of a group of dockland geeks who could revolutionise fuel production for the coming century.

Barry, his wife, their lecturer and a few fellow college classmates left MIT two years ago to start their own business, Ginkgo Bioworks, named after a rare plant classed as a living fossil. At the time there were plenty of research businesses going belly-up, and broke scientists were offloading lots of usable but unsaleable equipment. So Barry and his team did some scientific skip-diving, grabbing equipment for free or for cheap and fixing what need to be fixed to equip their lab. They fitted out their premises largely with orphaned machines, carted out the back door of college labs, and quietly went to work.

Two years later, things are a little different. US Vice-President Joe Biden has just cut a $6million cheque made out to Barry, his team and their collaborators to develop a new fuel from genetically-modified bacteria. That’s some good recycling.

Their work is, publicly, much-maligned stuff. The Ginkgo team deal in Franken-science, DNA-tinkering, injecting genetic material into a nasty little bacteria that most people treat with heavy doses of bleach spray. The modified E-Coli organisms that Ginkgo produce do not do what regular bacteria do. They emit fragrances, flavourings, and now a fuel that you can pour straight into the petrol tank of your car. Barry’s team are making a bacteria that ‘eats’ Carbon Dioxide and ‘poops’ a clean, lead-free, sulphur-free petrol.  And they have plans for much more. Their collaborators are working on bacteria that make foodstuffs. Bacteria that produce malaria drugs. Bacteria that kill cancer cells.

Of course, you’ve never heard anything about this Dublin-born scientist because, despite pitching the story widely to Irish newspapers, no-one wanted, or had the budget this feature. But it’s a story worth telling. So here it is, as it could have been, below the fold.

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YOU ARE:  A small NGO or non-profit organisation. Maybe you’re based in Dublin and work in the community here, or maybe you focus on sustainable development projects in Africa or elsewhere and partner with organisations in the field. You have a track record of getting things done and have proven success on the ground. You’re looking to produce some online audiovisual material that will tell your story but you don’t know where to start.

You need someone who can take your ideas, build them, polish them and produce something stirring that you can easily embed on your website and disperse online. And you want them to do it for free, because you have no money.

HE IS: Someone who’s looking to further build his own multimedia portfolio, a journalist who has a history of storytelling ability, and started his journalism career in photography before pursuing print. He’s someone who’s got a qualification in development studies and will understand your point of view.

He’s only recently turned to multimedia, but he’s been taking photos for more than 13 years, and so he’s got a good eye for framing a shot. And as he’s been turning out podcasts, he’s au fait with audio. He’s just looking for some good, interesting stories on which to put it all to use.

Does it sound like we have a match? Well then, we should meet.

For the next two weeks, I’ll take submissions from NGOs or community groups that want their story told in a new and creative way to help them promote themselves, cheer an achievement or particular success, or to thank someone that’s made a difference. And on June 24, I’ll sit down with the submissions and pick two, one Dublin-based and one that works overseas.

For those two organisations, I’m offering a once-off freebie, a film or audio slideshow of up to five minutes in length that I’ll produce in HD quality and give to your organisation to use as you see fit, for ZERO COST. We’ll collaborate on the storyboard and work together with a mix of whatever materials you might already have and new ones I’ll create. I’ll include your graphics to the best of my ability and to your spec. I’ll put every creative faculty I have at your disposal (within reason) in order to make something that will really stand out for you and your organisation, and in the interests of sustainability, I’ll show you exactly how I did it so that you can replicate it yourselves in the future and we’ll learn together. I’ll blog and tweet the process to give the project extra legs and promote it as widely as I can.

Interested?

Here’s what I want from you:

One creative story idea from your organisation.

That’s it. Just your best idea. Hit me with some background details, some suggestions on filming/photography locations, and how you think it might work. Email me at markham [dot] nolan [at] gmail [dot] com

I’ll pick the two winners based on feasibility, how interesting they sound, and we’ll take it from there.