ESL Carnival - Create a Green Project Like Mott Green: Like Water for Chocolate
by Gia Lovelady-Johnson
Editor's Note
August 1, 2013
Home and Garden Television says that you can live in a bamboo hut right on the beach in Nicaragua for a couple hundred dollars a month. Or maybe you could rent out a lavish villa with some amazing square footage on a rental budget of only $2,500 USD per month. But what do you really want to do with your ESL career and your love of diverse people and lands? What about helping to keep nature intact right in nature’s own backyard of Grenada. Wanting to keep nature intact is called true and utter environmental conservation & sustainability. Here is another way in which to compost your thoughts. (Grenada is located northwest of Trinidad and Tobago, northeast of Venezuela, and southwest of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines).
What can you do with your love of ESL, (English Second Language), love of people, geography, culture and environmentally green issues? You take all of your built up passions for the planet, climate change, organic farming and free-spiritedness and go from the less-desired road of total anarchy to the built-in bliss of achieving actual sustainability. You can solar-power your consciousness into something like what Mott Green accomplished back in 1999 when he moved from Staten Island, New York to Grenada and founded the Grenada Chocolate Company. (I mention anarchy here since Mott was considered to have been a naturalist and free-spirited anarchist).
Mott Green never taught ESL but he did, (I would say), teach people how to speak in ‘earth tones’ or love of the planet when he moved to Grenada 25 years ago. He taught the international community to speak in rich, dark chocolate bars. He taught the world the value of neatly hand-folding the wrapper of the virginal chocolate in the most friendly and protected and productive format humanly possible. It may sound like I’m discussing some new fangled hippie movement as I speak of relating to the masses, (all while keeping in mind the trees of the Grenadian rain forests).
Mott lived in Grenada for about eleven years before he came up with the idea of harvesting cocoa beans into chocolate candy. He did all of this by building his own equipment and by learning how to dry out the cocoa. He accomplished this by paying local coca farmers a living wage and by respecting child labor laws and the root of the cocoa plant in a country where it was originally rooted. There lies the essence of true love and of keeping nature intact and of keeping everything concerning his chocolate completely natural.
The Grenada Chocolate Company or Factory was born out of the pure desire to be earth and people conscious by sustaining wealth where wealth is already in its purist form: inside of the earth. In so thinking, Mr. Green translated his passion of people and its land into the Green’s company motto: “tree to bar.”
Mott Green was truly the Mother-Earth of free-spiritedness who pioneered solar-powered machinery to operate in Grenada but also was the first chocolate manufacturer to keep its farmed chocolate company in Grenada. His company was the first. His company also was the first to empower local cocoa farmers in humanitarian issues that used to plague the land’s inhabitants.
What this means is that there are more ideas than fewer when it comes to rolling-over all of your years of teaching ESL into a second career of protecting the environment. Some ways that would make Mott Green proud would be to build your second career by nullifying corporate greed and international waste.
During Mott’s pre-Grenada years he rebuilt a Volkswagen bus to run on electricity and solar-powered hot-water showers for squatters in Manhattan. (of which many were already his friends hoping for communal change in tough societies). Last year the company delivered tens of thousands of chocolate bars to Europe on a sail-powered Dutch ship, the Brigantine Tres Hombres, operated by a company called Fairtransport. A team of volunteer cyclists in Amsterdam helped handle distribution on the ground.
Mr. Green called it “the first carbon-neutral trans-Atlantic mass chocolate delivery.” A documentary film about the company, “Nothing Like Chocolate,” was directed by Kum-Kum Bhavnani and was released last year.
Whether it be a love for chocolate or just take your pick: your rolling-over your ESL career into something wonderful like conservation is like water for chocolate. You have only to take your invested years and place them into rich earth where the reward of growth can be measured by the many people whose lives you can transform.
You can find a segment of a day in the life of Mott Green on ESL Carnival’s website for a lovely tribute to environmental sustainability and a rich Caribbean delicacy.
(Mott Green passed away in Grenada in June 2013).
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