• Home-festival: Journey
I arrived at Spolek under some weird circumstances. To contextualize: my name is Giulia, I’m a 23 years old girl from Milano, Italy, and I’m gonna spend most of my August ’20 in a place in the north of Czech Republic, doing a workcamp project under the European Solidarity Corps program. It is the first time for me for this kind of experiences. I am not even too sure of what is, “this kind of experiences”. The description of the opportunity on the website was saying something like: nature, project, festival, village in the middle of nowhere, permaculture, vegan, 10 people from around Europe. Which are really beautiful words, but I don’t know; I feel like I don’t have the precise mental image of them inside me, in my mind. It’s some sort of impression, trying to feel the taste of a food you never tried from the description of someone who just did. And yes, I wanted to fill the gap! When I applied, I just knew it was something totally new for me. I grew up in the big city and I would had always considered myself the big-city-life kind of person. Stuff happening, continuously. Filling my time, always. But perhaps it is possible to fill fulfilled in some other ways, who knows.
Then: the weird circumstances were mostly connected to bicycles. That’s because, as a real bike fanatic that I am, I decided to bring my road bike to this place. I had a damn ton of luggage though, so, instead of being a cool kid and cycle all the way from Prague, I took the train until Usti Nad Labem and then cycled from there. I had an easy-peasy mentality, it was around 20 km which usually means 1 hour- 1 and an half top of journey usually, but, guess what, NO. Merboltice is on a hill with 600 m high difference, aaaall the way to climb. I kinda forgot to check :D
( - So guys, if someone other crazy person will want to follow my footprints, well, as I learnt later, come here from the Ceska Lipa direction, which is actually a pretty chill ride (I had the chance to cycle around there, couple of days ago). You will avoid to arrive tired, sweaty and desperate when it’s already dark at your first day of workcamp: guess it wouldn’t hurt :D – )
1. Sun is shining in this train ride, thank you Czechia. It is pretty, fields, green, small houses with a vibe of medievial alchemists (I cannot tell if that’s actually true or if it is me being biased by stereotypes).
How nice are crop fields. Calmness and rationality. There is a field and there is not the wild forest anymore, nothing unknown. It’s the mankind bending the nature and turning it in a drooling cute little doggo.
• First day: Giulia sleepy
Giulia sleepy. But Giulia happy. It’s 10.30 pm, so funny. My one-week ago person, used to stay up until 3, would have been laughing at me.
I woke up at 7AM this morning, after a really cold night in an Indian tent. Not Indian the brown Indian, Indian the American Indian. That is one of the possible accommodations: there is also a big room inside the house, but not all the ten mattresses are fitting, so some outcast are sleeping outside. So right now that’s gonna be me, Luigi (compatriot & bike buddy), Max from Austria, Arnè from Belgium. Not much of a big deal, but I really hope it will not rain during the nights because this cute Indian tent (which is called te-pee) has an hole on the top. They say the rain will not going in, but I don’t know, it is a pretty big hole :D
After a pretty big breakfast, we divided into the working groups, and started working indeed. The whole bunch of tasks, all sounds pretty new to me.
We’ll have to:
-build an outdoor kitchen out of a bunch of ruins in the garden,
-build an outdoor compost toilet.
I feel confused honestly, but it’s just the first day, let me get the hang of it :D And there are also gonna be a bunch of people doing more of an household jobs, like baking, picking up stuff out of the garden and the trees, and so on. As a good lazy Italian person I precisely spent my day on this, avoiding sweat and hammers to pick up calendula flower to dry, ribes and apples (there is an incredible amount of apples trees in this garden). It was nice and quiet, but I guess my time in the dirt and the construction work will come soon.
The place is something. It has coherence, I would say. Yeah: coherent. Nothing feels out of place, even though there are a lot of stuff around. There is this big farmhouse, wood and concrete, small windows. The kitchen is big and cozy, I like it. It has some small shelfs with an incredible variety of herbs which are seasoning all the different food. The diet is vegan. I never really ate vegan in my life and I am sure experimenting a lot. It is also nice how much attention it is given for the moment of cooking, half an hour or an one hour is given for every meal that’s establishing the different phases in a day (breakfast-break-lunch-break-dinner).
Everything with his purpose, inside and outside. There is a big area, kind of wild, lot of plants sometimes I never heard of; a lot of trees, also, with loads of small green apples which you would never see in a supermarket, and small bushes with spare berries, as I learned today. The place designated as a toilet is outside: for the liquids there’s a wall which is a bit of the Pee Wall, but
people are being independent about it; and, when the business gets solid, there is this place which is turning the material, apparently, into compost, fertilizer for the garden.
Stuff acquires a new values. Kinda impressed me, for instance, this toilet matter. It is something you don’t think about: in our ordinary houses, after all it is magic what happens every day. Just push a button and poop is going away, away. Away where? That’s another thing you don’t want to think about, and then you end up swimming in it every summer.
• Feeling sessions
I’m feeling something in the belly. I don’t know if should define it: “I’m hungry” because maybe that’s a bit of a flattening up feelings. Bellies have feelings too, don’t them? I guess they can feel other stuff beside the desire of nutrition. Who knows. Also about that topic: last night I saw a few of them dancing in the twilight. There is one of the three Czech girl of the group, Paja, who does some belly dancing in life and she threw a workshop for us all. It is part of the whole “share your ability thing”, there is a poster for it in the kitchen where people can write on, and so, she broke the ice. Good job Paja!
And she got moves. Most of the people joined, but I personally decided to be lame and lazy and I was part of the observes. But every show needs a public after all, no?
Weather is getting warmer, it almost looks like is summer. The feeling session of today 8 AM was in the middle of the field, an ocean of green which feels like your utopical place in the world, and the sun was beating us up already in a pretty mean way. We made a circle, because -of course- in this horizontal-hierarchy environment it is the only shape possible for a group. And then there was this tiny blade of glass which was our talking master – what? Explained: it was like in kindergarden, when only the person holding the “something” in his hand had the possibility to talk. It might look silly but actually it is not, because it gives you time to think about what you are saying, it is the moderator of the conversation. I truly never though about it like that, and I actually really like this vision. There was Kafka, one of Czech resident ladies whom name I am not sure how to properly write, which was the human assistant of Mr. Grass. She was the one saying that (the time to think about stuff thing). She says a lot of stuff full of sense. Really direct, doesn’t lose herself in words, and that’s even more remarkable considering English is not her first language. I like her. I would it consider that quite an important quality in a person.
And so, that was our morning activity. Just three words to describe how you feel.
How
You
Feel ?
And now to work.
• Two weeks
It is Aug 20th, two weeks since I am here. I am not sure if it is a long time, but sure it was filled up. Really filled up. In two days there’s gonna be the lovely Hvodzeni Home Festival, I seem to understand on his second edition. (correction: it is the fifth). Sure the place changed. We built stuff from the starches :D
I have to say that, when you look at something you made, it is so amazing. Every nail it’s your little kiddo. You feel the story behind, as I now quietly feel the story behind the composting toilet cottage-style, which has been my workplace for basically the last week.
Oh, an off topic comes to my mind. Composting shit, just so embracing all that ecologist philosophy. It is always about “zero waste”, the sort of thing of living closely with nature and not overdoing an impact, and you can see it everywhere in the house: in the garden, where there is plenty of trees and plants where a good part of the nutrition is taken from, or in the toilet downstairs, which shouldn’t really be used, because, “when the nature calls”, there is this amazing outdoor structure appositely designated for that. And so on. Beside the fact that I had no plans for August, I think this is one of the main reasons I applied for this project: I feel like I am used to ready-made stuff, being food, objects, or even houses, that I lost of the conception of the process. You buy food, but food is actually made by ingredients, you can buy a chair, but what is a chair, if not bunch of pieces of wood. I realized it I was losing it, and I want to take care of the process, the process is important because it is what gives value to stuff. Otherwise, they just lose value more and more, and everything become the same.
The group is so various, but it is really working out. Last weekend we took a daring trip together, going to Prague in the impressive number of 11 people. Planning was kinda funny, funny in the ironic sense of something extremely annoying: but then, when we finally settled down for an hostel after a whole afternoon, beer joined our hearts and tequila shots joyfully flattened up our thinking process. I have the impression the party was cool, I don’t remember it too well though, sorry :D
A sort of routine arrived. The narrow line of bonding was crossed, with group dynamics shaping clearly and clearly. The festival is in two days, and then is gonna be a party (they say). Everyone is excited in planning.
Settling down is always a nice feeling.