2013.03.22
La Juanita de Guatevita
La Juantina is a small private farm
outside of the small country town of Guatavita. It is both a
Wwoofing farm and eco-tourism guest house – all owned and run by
one relatively young dude, Felipe Spath.
I arrived here about a week and half
ago, after spending 10 days floundering around in Bogota, feeling
lost and overwhelmed. Traveling by myself, with no particular plans,
and not speaking the local language, apparently it's kind of easy to
lose focus on what the goals are.
Ok so... trip goals:
- do art – ideally every day
- explore healing sanctuaries
- learn to speak Spanish
- meet local people and get to know communities – ideally by doing some useful volunteer work
- gain perspective about the world
During my week in Bogota, I largely
forgot about all of those things. I mostly just wandered, walking
around town taking pictures of graffiti art and learning how to use
the transit system. I wanted to take Spanish classes during that
week, but losing my credit card in Cartagena made it pretty difficult
to actually do stuff like that, since most of my time and energy were
focused on getting myself re-sorted out.
But then I headed out to La Juanita, in
the rural town of Guatavita, bringing a lot of expectations and
notions along with me. I came here as a Wwoofer (work-exchange on
organic farms for cheap traveling). The arrangement is that the
travelers do some volunteer farm-work in exchange for free room and
board. At least, that's usually the basic arrangement. In Colombia,
it's expensive to feed people so most farms ask volunteers to help
pay for their food, but food is pretty cheap, so depending on the
farm, it could be $3-$12 a day. Wwoofing is an organization that
exists all over the world, is at least 20 years old, and is probably
the cheapest way to travel anywhere, short of picking up paid work as
you go. It can also be a fantastic way to get to know people and
communities.
And Wwoofing at La Janita is an
excellent way to get to know this community, because Felipe is a hub
of community organizing and networking. He started a Tedx group for
his town, Tedx Guatavita. In fact, just before I came here, Felipe
was in California, at the big Tedx conference in San Franciso, on a
scholarship. Which is pretty hot shit. I feel like there is so much
awesome stuff going on in this community, that I want to stay and
learn about. One of the great things about wwoofing at La Juanita, s
that Felipe takes his volunteers along to lots of community workshops
and events. In two weeks of staying
with him, I got to help build an herb spiral at the little
mountaintop farm to two women, visit La Lagoona la Guatavita, the
famous lake of the Eldorado Legend, go to a rural cinema showing of
movies about food security, and attend a community worm composting
workshop at a farm outside of a really little town. Two weeks of
volunteering here feels full and exciting and relaxing at the same
time.
Felipe speaks fluent English, and
there are also two more American volunteers here, Emilio (Milo at
home) and Lindsey. They are traveling together and they've been
friends for a really long time, and I get along great with them.
They both studied environmental biology/ecology at UC Santa Cruse, in
California.
Lindsey and I quickly discovered that
we're kindred spirits (according to her it's because we're both
scorpios – deeply emotional, slightly melodramatic). She is
currently trying to decide whether she wants to keep pursuing biology
and science as a career, or shift her focus to yoga and dance.
During our time at the farm, Lindsey and I were often the only women
in a very male environment, and we take turns giving each other
emotional support as we each try to figure out what the hell we're
trying to accomplish by traveling
Milo is a career farmer and he's got
the whole Wwoofing routine down pat. At home, he runs his own
landscaping business. He is so enthusiastic about farming and
ecology, that sometimes when he talks about it, his whole being just
vibrates with excitement and love.
Milo and Lindsey both speak Spanish,
and are nice enough to give me daily crash courses, but I'm just not
picking up anything useful when I'm able to speak English all day
long. In fact, I have this odd, awkward sort of feeling of being on
a family vacation where our host is a distant relative and the whole
visit is a family work party. I'm happy to have come to La Juanity
and met Felipe and Milo and Lindsey, but I know that if I want to
learn Spanish and follow my own path, I need to leave their company,
and leave the comforting safety net of the English language.
What I really want to be doing right
now, is ART. THE ART! I've found a couple of really outstanding
volunteer options to teach/do art with kids, and I'm jumping at those
options. From here out, the whole tone of my trip is DOING ARTWORK.
I'm a slow learner, and often the universe sends me these messages
and I'm like, “yeah, yeah, I'll get to that...” except I never
do... I think the focus of my personal work for this whole trip is
learning how to make my identity as an artist 1st before everything
else. Learning to let go of fear of the unkown, letting go of
self-consciousness and self-limitations about doing what I need to
do. Getting my butt and my art supplies out into a public plaza and
busking that shit.
There is something immensely freeing
about being on a trip like this, and having all sorts of shit go
wrong right at the beginning. It's like, ok, well I did that. Not I
know how that works. It's not nearly so scary. This morning at
breakfast, Lindsey gave me a pep talk about living in the “now”.
Not stressing out about whether I'm in the right place, or where I'm
going to next... just being and appreciating the journey I'm on. It
was sort of a pep talk to me and to herself at the same time. And
she's right. I'm carrying all of this anxiety all of the time about
finding the “perfect” experience... obsessing over where I'm
going to go, and what I will
be doing, instead of the being.
So here is the end of this blog post.
Staying at La Juanita has done for me exactly what I needed from it,
which was to get a chance to breath, and find my center, and make
some plans for the rest of my trip.
Ecuador is still pulling at me... But
I've just started getting my shit figured out in Colombia, and
there's so much here... I'm navigating this traveler's discomfort...
wanting to stay in one place long enough to have a real understanding
of it and to make some real relationships... and the conflicting
desire to GO TO ALL THE PLACES AND DO ALL THE THINGS. Suddenly,
three months feels like not nearly enough time to properly get to
know one country, let alone two.
But right now, I'm on the bus back to
Bogota, going to meat up with some cool kids from couchsurfing.com
and we're gonna go backpacking in the Sierra Nevada mountains this
weekend.
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