Barichara: Navigating New Terrain…

This week we are back in Costa Rica spending a few days in San Jose before we make our way to Finca Las Koalas where we will be spending the next month of our stay. We’re very excited to move into this next chapter of the adventure even if at times a little daunted by the thought of looking after a farm and a bunch of animals which is something we’ve never done before!

However, before getting into things here I still have a lot of work to do with trying to do justice to everything that happened during our time in Barichara.

This week is almost certainly going to be a single-post week. I generally try to write 2 posts: partly as I continue to chase my own tail (or tale) trying to catch up with the events of the present and also because so much seems to happen in a week that it is really the minimum to try and cover it all. However, this week we have been travelling from Barichara to Bucaramanga, from Bucaramanga to Bogotá and finally from Bogotá to San Jose! When you describe that to other people as your week it sounds luxurious and of course on many levels it is: we are travelling from one country full of natural beauty and riches to another with our two wonderful children on a year’s adventure of discovery and exploration. At the same time it’s hard work and it’s not as glamorous as the one line description would suggest – it’s very tiring in fact. So here we are at last back in the country where we began our adventure but it’s already Thursday afternoon and I’ve only just started to write a post to go out! I’ve also been torn on the matter of how to structure writing up our time in Barichara which has resulted in a fair amount of procrastination. Up until now our time has more or less been divided into neat little chunks of a week in a place and the posts have been able to follow that pattern. Spending 5 weeks in one place disrupted that. I’ve been going back and forth between writing up a chronological account or cutting our time up into themes. However, I’ve never been very good at telling a story in anything other than its fullness. I find it hard when recounting what happened to filter out some details as insignificant and choose others as significant – it’s all part of what occurred at the time. It’s hard to jump around a tale without mentioning things that need and often deserve their own introduction, like bringing a new character into the story. So for now I’ve decided to keep our story rolling along as it happened.

To be truthful our first weeks in Barichara didn’t turn out how we had expected them. We had spent over 3 months travelling around as a family of 4 and we had got used to spending time that way. We had also been in a pattern of moving every week for most of that time which after a while created at least some kind of pattern; even if it was a pattern of ongoing disruption. Now we found ourselves in Barichara where we were going to be for 5 weeks. I think that it left us asking questions. Questions about whether we would be happy there which we never had to consider in any of those shorter stays. Without ever being conscious of the fact, we had got used to each week finding our food, planning our next stay and filling up our time that way before moving on. A theme which keeps surfacing for us recently has been that sometimes you need to step away from something to see it clearly. Stopping in Barichara was the first time we’d ‘stood still’ since leaving and consequently the first time we had stopped and reflected on that period of constant movement around Costa Rica. We left the UK so that we could look at our lives from a distance and hopefully get a better view. Similarly, as we left Barichara we were curious how it would look and feel from a distance once we were back in Costa Rica.

After our friend Rachel had given us our initial introduction to the town our friend Joe had returned from his trip to Colorado. Although we had spoken with Joe on various zoom calls it was the first time that we would meet in person. We met at La Penita (the best place to eat in Barichara in our opinion) where we had the usual helping of delicious, traditional Colombian food. We were the first family (other than Joe’s) from our online community to make the trip to Barichara to explore the regenerative work under way there and I think that this fact presented new challenges. It’s relatively easy for an individual to up and visit and have the freedom to slot into what needs to happen in a place. Individuals can be nimble and free from a schedule and they only need to seek consent from themselves. A family unit of 4 has a lot more needs that need to be met at any one time. Finding choices, paths and schedules that meet all of them at the same time can be very hard work.

Zia had been keen since we began our travels to go to school once we had this significant stop in Barichara. Joe gave us the number for one of the local schools called Totumo where his daughter Elise was going. He was also keen to connect us with other families in the area and told us that one of the local children was having a birthday party that afternoon. He sent a message to her mother Shona (who happens to be from England) and we soon had ourselves an invitation to head out of town and join the party that afternoon. With hindsight this was probably a big step for us all to take but it also felt like the right thing to do – to meet with other families while we had the opportunity. It particularly felt like it would be good while we had the opportunity for the girls to be able to play with some other children as this had become something that as parents we had become very aware of.

We arrived at the party and it was kind of hard work. Barichara has some really great community. Families who spend a lot of time together and many of whom had been through the covid-19 pandemic together. A close knit group of friends. That is not to say that people weren’t welcoming – quite the opposite, but it’s always harder to fall in with a group like that. With adults that is possibly a little easier but the group of kids was actually very hard for our girls to get into, not least of all because they mainly spoke in Spanish which left Rosa and Zia at least a little excluded. Sadly this meant that they spent a lot of the time clinging to Rachael. Nevertheless, it was a great opportunity to meet some other people in Barichara.

The following day we went for a long walk with Joe to Las Albercas, a piece of land which they have managed to purchase with the long term intention of establishing a new ‘ecoversity’ there. It was great fun walking along there as the girls were beginning to get along with Elise. Zia finds this easy as she has spent years going first to playgroups, nursery and then later to school. For Rosa that same period in her life was profoundly affected by the pandemic: she is of a slightly shy disposition anyway but that year or so of lockdown and the continuing restrictions meant that in those same formative years she had far less opportunity to develop her social skills. Nevertheless, she joined in with them and we trekked our way up the steep slopes to make our way to the house of a dutch couple who live just on the other side of the site. Once we had arrived unfortunately our girls were beginning to show signs of the strain. Over the course of that first week in Barichara we had found that one of the disadvantages to the beautiful open design of the houses was that they afford little protection from mosquitoes. For some reason my feet are indescribably appealing to these little bloodsuckers and by the second or third day I was able to count at least 20-30 bites per foot! Fortunately, our neighbours back home had gifted us a clever little device before we left which has a little ceramic plate that heats up and dissipates the pain and reduces the swelling. First of all we called it the Zapper but it quickly became known as Frank (Zappa). This was all well and good for me but wasn’t an option for Rosa who is apparently just as delicious as I am and has a similarly bad reaction to the bites. Along with all of the other adjustments that we were having to make in our new home we were desperately trying to find ways to tackle the fact that she was getting eaten alive and suffering with it. On our walk that morning we all got bitten a lot.

The emotional backdrop to these early weeks was reasonably turbulent. There was tension and it took us a little while to disentangle and understand exactly what was going on and how we were going to deal with it. After a little while we realised that part of this was down to some of the ways in which Rachael and I are different. I have always liked to socialise and whilst Rachael also loves to talk to people she finds it draining if its a lot of socialising, whereas I find it quite energising. One evening when we were sat in the house and having a chat with Joe he gave us both a definition of extrovert and introvert which we’d not heard before and found especially useful. He pointed to the exact thing that we had found: that an extrovert is someone who is energised by socialising and an introvert finds it leaves them tired. For us that really hit the nail on the head and probably provided a useful framework in which we could operate. Obviously we didn’t want our 5 week stay to be that I went off while Rachael was left to look after the girls and as I’ve also said already we are constantly trying to address the challenge of finding ways of being that keep all of us happy.

Another ongoing challenge in that first week had been that we were trying to make arrangements for Zia to go to a local school. The first lead that we’d been given for Totumo turned out to be a dead end as they got back to us to say that Zia would be too old to join them. Fortunately, our friend Margarita had given us the details for Ana Paloma the teacher at La Quincha who got back to us saying that they would be happy to have Zia join them. She provided a few details about what it would cost for her to attend the school, take the bus out there and be provided with lunch and a snack at breaktime. Although it had been a bit of work to find a school that Zia could attend, once we had found the right one it was all surprisingly easy to organise. It was all very quickly arranged and we agreed that Zia would go out there the following day to see how she got on!

The following day Zia and I were up early to get her off for her first day at school. We set off around 7:30am to walk along the ridge that marks the western side of Barichara and head around to the park near the cemetery where the bus would collect her. We were the first ones there and met with Octavio who was the bus driver for the schools in the morning and the afternoon and drove a tuk-tuk in Barichara through the day. I had a brief chat with him and then Zia got onto the bus. Octavio asked me if I was going out there too and at first I said that I was heading off to do a few things but after taking just a few steps I realised that I didn’t have any schedule to adhere to so I turned back and joined them on the bus. The ride out there was really fun. It was about a 15 minute ride out into the countryside surrounding Barichara. I got to meet Ana Paloma briefly and I was happy that I’d changed my mind to see where Zia would be spending her day. Then I jumped back onto the bus to catch a ride back into town again.

This first day of Zia going to school turned out to be the beginning of yet another transition that we would have to go through as a family. Throughout the lockdown at the beginning of the pandemic we had already experienced how when we had both of the girls together we could form a functional family unit as they mostly play together happily. This dynamic had then come back into play during our travels which at times took the form of a kind of mobile lockdown. However, now with Zia back at school we had our first taste of how it would affect things. Rosa had lost her playmate and so now it was falling to Rachael again to be the entertainment.

Zooming out and looking back at those first weeks it’s easy to see the pattern. Things were changing and that makes it unfamiliar which is something that stresses most people. Nearly everyone across the planet experienced that at the beginning of the pandemic. We had continued to experience that in our constant movements. Now we were again in a period of change but in those other instances it had been outside circumstance that was changing whilst our family unit remained unbroken: now the changes that we were experiencing were within that dynamic of four people.

Reading back through what I’ve written this week I’m well aware that it paints a bit of a bleak picture. However, I feel that it is a fair and honest account of what we experienced in those first weeks. We were torn between different things. Rachael and I spent time unpicking how and why we had found ourselves in such a beautiful house, in a gorgeous town in the Andes with a welcoming community and yet feeling unhappy. One thing that surfaced was that for the first time we were feeling homesick. The close-knit community that we had found ourselves dropped into reminded us of the community that we have back home. Whilst we were definitely welcomed in we were also aware that we would be leaving. Once again life was reflecting back at us our life at home and our life on the move through the mirror of where we were. We also had that problem that I mentioned at the beginning of the post; that we were scrutinising where we were because we had a more significant time to spend there. It probably took a little time to let that go and to simply enjoy being there. With 5 weeks to spend there we also had to contend with the desire to get involved and make a contribution with what would be realistic within that time frame. All of these themes I’m sure will resurface as we continue to unravel the time we spent in Barichara.

It wouldn’t be right if I finished up this post without a counterpoint to the fact that I’ve painted the foreground of our picture with worry, tension, doubt and feeling out of place. There was plenty that we enjoyed as well. In that first week we got to spend a good amount of time with Joe and Elise. For us it was almost certainly the highlight of those early days. We knew that Zia and Rosa were in need of other children and it brought us a great deal of joy to see the three girls run off into the distance as they explored this beautiful spot in the Andes. In those first days we got to enjoy having the 3 girls together in the house, taking them to the park, going out to eat and playing together up in the Bioparque. Whilst we may have struggled a bit with the internal adjustments that we needed to make to our new situation we were also aware and thankful of the huge benefits that this would be bringing to our children at the moment when it was probably most needed.