THE NEXUS INTERVIEW

Iala Jaggs - Destination: Costa Rica

RD: You left the U.S. to move to the jungle in Costa Rica in 1993. What inspired you do it?

IJ: Everyone’s interested in Costa Rica now, but when I moved there, I couldn’t get anyone to come down to save my life. Most people didn’t even know where it was; they thought it was an island. But I had a vision: I had to go there and create a sanctuary.

It fit in with what I was doing already. Starting in the late 1980s I had a children’s touring company that was all about the environment. Then I realized that I was telling children things that I wasn’t completely doing myself. And it came to me that I was supposed to create a sanctuary where people could figure out why they’re really here. I convinced my husband Akal and we ended up buying 24 acres of land, with the help of friends. Our place was one mile from the nearest neighbor, 9 miles from the nearest small town, and 6 hours from a small city.

When we first got there, we camped under a tree while we built a house. But we had to build the house completely ourselves, and we didn’t know what we were doing. And there’s no electricity, so we had to do everything by hand. We bought two horses for $70. They came with saddles. The mare was pregnant so soon we had 3. For a year the horses were our only transportation, then Akal bought a motor cycle that rarely worked. So we got around on horses mostly the whole time we were there.

RD: You were completely off the grid?

IJ: Yes; we had solar, but not a lot. We had one light at night, and we could run our pump from our well, but on cloudy days we had to conserve water. Later, when I wanted to write, we had a little word processor that I could use for about an hour a day when the sun was high. And later, we got a really old-fashioned fridge. We danced around like pagans: we had ice water after five years!

RD: If you used all your money to buy the land and build the house, how did you survive? What did you do for food?

IJ: Eventually, we had cashew trees, avocado trees, bananas and coconuts. For the first few years, before our food came in, we survived on trading massage and chiropractic care for food, and we did a few other things. Akal is a massage therapist and chiropractor. He’d do an adjustment in exchange for a case of mangos, then we’d take the mangos and make this stuff like fruit leather that we called “Fruita Rica,” and sell it to surfers on the beach. We also started a business making pao d’arco. It’s an amazing herb from the inside of a tree bark that’s used for candida, blood purifying, even cancer. And you don’t have to kill a tree to get it; you just have to harvest it properly. I also taught English classes at the schools.

We built our place as if we’d have a lot of people visiting, but we didn’t. When people did come, they couldn’t handle nature. That’s something that shocked me. People who said they liked to camp, or they liked nature, would freak out. They wouldn’t enjoy their stay, and they would say, “That was really tough.”

Sometimes it was tough. There were lots of bugs. We didn’t have walls, because we wanted the breezes to come through when it was hot, so it got really cold at night. Rain and bugs came right into the house. And there was a jaguar that used to come around.

Army ants would come through the house, they come through in a swath as wide as this room. You can’t do anything but vacate for a couple of hours. You can’t just walk through them; they’re eating everything in their path, and the bites really sting. I was attacked once when I went in the pre-dawn darkness down to the outhouse. I couldn’t see that they were already there. I sat down on the ant--covered toilet seat. They were all over me before I could get out. I had ten days of fevers and chills; I was hallucinating.

But the worst are the bullet ants. They’re nearly an inch long, and when they bite, it’s like a bullet going into you, and it hurts so bad, you’re screaming for half an hour. One was on the car seat when I got in one day.

Nature also includes weather. When Hurricane Mitch came through, we didn’t even know about it at first. We knew it was really raining, and pretty windy. We finally got some radio reception, and we heard that a hurricane was coming, all around us, and we were an island.

RD: How did you get out?

IJ: Akal’s mother gave us an Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme that became famous in the country. The roads are terrible, and at first, everyone was laughing at us, saying “What are you doing in that car?” But we were glad for it then. We put an emergency supply in the car, in case we had to hide out there. Everything was soaked through in the house, since we had no walls, and then we ran out of food. All we had were hard green bananas. We kept thinking it would stop, but it went on for 18 days. After the hurricane stopped, I went on my horse Hercules into town and got some food. We were okay, but it was hard.

RD: Was it tough being alone in the wilderness with your husband in a survivalist situation? Was it good for your marriage?

IJ: He’s a trooper. And we went through times that were really tough; a few times, I almost died. The hurricane was hard. I almost died after the army ants. Another time I was driving the Oldsmobile after the rainy season across the river, and the car slid so it was hanging off a cliff. And then I got ehrlichea and I almost died then, too.

RD: Tell me about that.

IL: It’s caused by a tick that carries a parasite. It goes into your joints first, and then it goes into your bone marrow. When it gets into your bone marrow, that’s it. It crippled me; I couldn’t walk at all. Eventually 49 people on my peninsula got it. No one knew what it was. I was planning to go to Peru to work in my girlfriend’s orphanage, and I heard that people were getting steroid shots for it. I got one, and the next day I could walk. But the shot was only supposed to last a month. When I got to Peru, I found Don Augustin, an ayahuascera, who knew what it was. He was a traditional healer. I had to drink a special drink at 6 a.m. every morning, then jump in the Amazon. And I got better.

RD: It seems odd that you would go to work in an orphanage when you were crippled and couldn’t walk.

IJ: I had that steroid shot, so I could walk by then. I was very ill, but it was amazing. And I went down in part to spend time with the ayahuasceras.

RD: Who are the ayahuasceras?

IJ: The ayahuasceras are healers, the ultimate doctors. They drink ayahuasca, a sacred drink that’s made from a vine that’s native to the Amazon and another plant that grows high in the Andes. This tea puts them into a trance and makes them go on what’s called an ayahuasca journey, in which they have visions. When they’re on an ayahuasca journey, they look for a particular, and the plant tells them everything about its sap, leaves, stem, roots, what its properties are, how to heal with it. If an ayahuascera really works with that plant and eats a diet of only white rice and boiled bananas for that whole time, it gives him a song that they call an icaros. So when they’re in an ayahuasca ceremony with you, and they see there’s something wrong with you, like my illness, they don’t have to give you the plants. They just have to sing the song, and the plant energy comes across.

RD: Your stories are fascinating, and most people don’t have such experiences.

IJ: No? Well, they’re not willing to. Some people think they want to let go of everything and go live in a jungle, and they think they’ll just be spending all their time lying in a hammock. If you get in a hammock once a month, you’re lucky, because living there is hard work. I suggest that if you want to move to a place like we did, you keep a place in North America. You can go back for three months in the rainy season, do whatever work you need to do, and then return to your place in the jungle. We knew very few foreigners who stayed there the whole year round; we were about the only ones.

RD: What made you finally leave the jungle?

IJ: It was because my pet wolf Loba, who I had been given to me, died from ehrlichea, and it was too intense for us. We were in deep mourning, and we went through a dark night of the soul, big time. We had worked very hard at living there, very hard for many years …

RD: Did you feel betrayed by this disease that was carried by the ticks that lived on the animals on the land?

IJ: I don’t know about feeling betrayed, but it was very bad. I will not live in the jungle again, because the ticks are still there. I’m working with agricultural radionics now for pest control. We need to find some way to get rid of the ticks in the whole country.

If you live in Costa Rica, you can live fairly well on the beach; if you’re within 200 meters of the salt, it’s fairly safe. But if you’re in a jungle, you’ll probably have ticks and if you do, you’re going to be very ill. There are treatments, but I don’t want to go through six weeks of really high doses of antibiotics. I’m lucky to be alive. But my husband never got it.

We also didn’t go to Costa Rica the way a lot of Westerners do. They go down with a lot of money. They have air conditioning and satellite phones; they have washers and dryers and refrigerators and electricity. They don’t really live in Costa Rica; they bring America with them. But we were living like the locals. We knew a lot of local people, and we went through a lot of intense things with our neighbors.

When we felt like it was time to leave, we went to Don Augustine, the ayahuascera shaman in Peru, and he said go to the Four Corners and wait in Sedona, and miracles will happen. We still have to go back and tell him what’s happened.

Britt Newell - Destination: Paraguay

RD: How did you end up leaving Colorado and moving to Paraguay in South America?

BN: I had a company in Boulder, Desktop Solutions. We were an Apple authorized service provider and consulting firm. We sold Macintosh systems. Then in 2002, Apple discontinued independent re-seller programs, started opening-up their own stores and sold directly on the web, so it was time for me to look at new horizons. I’d had a friend in Paraguay, South America, who had a ranch. They’d been inviting me to come down for years.

I’ve been training horses since I was a kid. I taught classes in horse training through the old Community Free School. My friend had 22,000 acres in Paraguay, a pretty good sized ranch, with horses and cattle and yerba mate tea, which he exported to the United States. So I went down there to help out with horses and tea and fell right in love with the place. It was so beautiful, and such a relief to think that I could be in an area like that and live the lifestyle that I saw there. I came back to Boulder, liquidated my life up here, I shipped a container of everything that was leftover into the center of nowhere in Paraguay.

My pay was $200 a month, plus my friend built me a house on the ranch, about 1500 square feet big. It had modern plumbing and a rock floor and a lot of windows overlooking a creek and a valley in front of me. It was very nice. Then I met my wife-to-be down there.

RD: How did you meet her?

BN: She was the administrator of the ranch. She had a couple of kids who were staying with her, and other children that were at her parents’ home in a nearby town. Her husband had died in a tractor rollover accident on the ranch a couple of years before I moved there.

Her name is Marcelina Ramirez. We wound up getting married in December after meeting in August.

RD: Was it OK with your ranch-owner friend that you married his young administrator?

BN: Well, actually, there turned out to be a little bit of friction, because Marcelina is Paraguayan. My friend’s father is married to a Brazilian woman, and she felt that I should be picking either a Brazilian or Argentinean, or somebody besides a Paraguayan.

RD: Describe Marcelina.

BN: She was 28 when I met her, and she already had a family well underway with five children. I wound-up having a sixth child with her, our little boy, Joney, who is four and a half. We live in this area where it’s all subsistence farming. People don’t really make money or have jobs. My father-in-law, for instance, is what you’d call a wheelwright. He makes the wooden wheels with the steel bands that are riveted onto them for ox-pulled carts. So he earns probably the equivalent of $50 a month producing these wheels, making them all by hand, no power tools of any kind, making a hub and hollowing it out with a chisel, setting spokes into the hub, quite a craft. The people all work in a community garden of about 50 acres. They grow peanuts, soy, cotton and sesame. They sell those crops and the community uses the money for schooling and things. And just about everybody in San Pedro is related. I was always being introduced to aunts, uncles, nieces and nephews.

RD: How did the community receive you? You’re not the usual husband of a 28-year-old with five kids in San Pedro, right?

BN: For three years I never ran into anyone else who spoke English. They received me quite warmly. They were very interested in my skills. I had been involved in the automotive industry here in Boulder for a number of years, and brought all my tools down there. I brought lots of carpentry tools such as a table saw. I had plumbing skills. The people in the community saw that I was capable with my hands so I kind of gained their respect and their interest.

I opened-up a mechanic shop with my brother-in-law. He’s been able to help support his mother and father, if they need medical attention or whatever, which is a big thing for that family, to have a business in town. So I felt like I was really integrating into the community and contributing positively to not just my immediate family, but the extended family that I became part of.

We rented a nice little house and improved it. The front yard had a spring that fed a swimming pool. So this was our place to play during the day, and the spill-off from that little dam was where we took showers. I eventually put running water into the bathroom in the house.

RD: Marcelina has five other children, who you adopted?

BN: Yes.

RD: And how old is the oldest?

BN: The oldest girl just turned 15, Daisy. They pronounce it “Dicey” down there.

RD: After leaving the ranch where you earned $200 per month and received free lodging, how did you figure you were going to support yourself in San Pedro?

BN: After visiting there a number of times, I saw that the family lived quite well off the land. And they were inviting me to be part of their family. So I wasn’t worried about how I was going to make it. I just went there on faith.

RD: But you fly back to Colorado. How does that work? How much does it cost?

BN: It’s gotten up to about $1350.

A few years ago, I decided I wanted to buy my own piece of property, have my own farm. That required capital, so I came back to the United States and started selling Subarus for a dealer in Boulder. I found that I could do well with that and was able to go back and forth to Paraguay. I’ve gone back four or five times in the last year.

I have since moved my family. We’ve settled in a community that’s a little more progressive than where we were, a little more modern, a little more happening. And we’ve developed a little farm. We bought three pieces of property that are adjoining. I’ve built two houses on the property, and improved another house.

RD: Why two?

BN: Well, I’ve got a lot of family. My brother-in-law is living there as well, on and off, and my wife’s sister and her two children live there. It’s a big family, and it’s good to have family around. This is the way society functions down there, by family helping family.

And we have a little store in town. My sister-in-law, brother-in-law, my wife and my oldest daughter, all work at the store.

RD: What does the store sell?

BN: It’s sort of a general store, which you see a lot of. Small, about 700 sq. ft., big metal door that you roll-up in the morning that opens up the whole front of the space. My wife goes to Sidad de Este (SPELLING) with her brother, which is a border town with Brazil, where you can get just anything you want, very cheap. It’s the shopping center of South America. They buy a mix of goods. This time of year they’re buying hats and socks and things that people want when it’s cold. So everything from hair clips to flip-flops and toys. And my brother-in-law just bought the family an old Volkswagen. He loads up the car and travels into the subsistence farming communities and sells products out of the car, which is a common thing out there, everything from pots and pans to blankets.

RD: What’s the profit from the store?

BN: My wife seems to be able to make about $200 a month, over the cost of the goods and the rent, which is actually very good money. If she were only working at a store, or say working as a secretary, with computer skills and so on, her income would probably only be $100 a month. So a little store making $200 a month is actually good money..

RD: But can you pay some family members to also be clerks in the store?

BN: Well, it isn’t that she’s paying other family members. It’s just that they’re living on our properties and we’re providing food and refrigerators, and all that. It would be an insult for a family member to ask for money to help. They just show-up, and if they want to integrate into your plan, they pitch and are with you, and you feed them. If they get sick, you buy their medicine.

RD: Lately you spend most of your time in the U.S. you told me. How long do you stay when you go back to Paraguay?

BN: Over the last year, usually three weeks. We do have cell phone communication, and I speak to the family at least a couple of times a day. I am looking forward to retiring to South America and not coming back anymore. With a family that size, you have to own your own property. If a family has property where houses can be built the family will stay together. Otherwise some members have to go away to find work.

I want to provide the kids with opportunities for schooling and so on, that wouldn’t otherwise be available to them.

RD: Do you feel sincerely like your wife and her whole family really care about you, own you as a family member, or do you feel at all as if you’re still a foreigner in their world?

BN: I certainly feel that they have accepted me as part of the family. Unlike a lot of dads I’m totally devoted to family all day long. I don’t have to work or do other things. I’m doing projects that the kids love to help with. I’m involved with their lives. And I provide them with things that many of the children there don’t have. I’ve brought down a number of computers and printers, digital cameras, so that the kids are learning new things. They love playing with the computer. The 14-year-old girl is a great artist in photoshop. Of course, my wife is very fortunate to have a partner that is building this future for her family. And she’s right there with me, helping every step of the way.
The other people in the community where I have have now lived for a consistent number of months at a time, they want to get to know me better. The last time I visited there was a festival at the school. My daughter wanted me to come to meet her teachers. They were just great to me. They asked a lot of questions and were really interested in meeting me and telling me how the kids were doing in school and so on. And wanted me to come to their teachers meetings. I helped, too, with their little fundraiser. They wanted to build another schoolhouse. They went to Asuncion, the capital of Paraguay, and got additional money and built another schoolhouse about six months later.

So I really like the people, the way they are interested in foreigners who would want to live among them and to be part of their society. They’re a little bit amazed. Many of them think the best thing that could happen to them is to maybe wind-up in the United States. So they wonder why I’m going in the other direction.

RD: It sounds like life there is dramatically different from life here.

BN: It is. Let me tell you about the mentality of the people there, the flow of their daily lives. Here in the United States, we are an individualistic society, a society of specialists. Our focus is on our own personal goals and the goals that we have with our immediate partner In Paraguay everything that you do, all decisions, involves family. Here in the U.S. daily life is, I think, driven by a plan to accomplish certain things. And we measure our successes as to how well we do achieving those goals. In Paraguay, there is no long-term plan, really. People live in the here and now. In their own native language, Guarani, they don’t have a word for “future.” They don’t realize it, but they have a very strong Buddha nature. They’re at peace with everything that happens. They may have a plan to do some project there at the property, but if it rains that would definitely change that plan. If it rains real hard the roads are too muddy to travel to town. It could be four days before you get to town. So what do you do when it rains? You just go with the flow.

You get up in the morning. People will come by. If they were going to help with your project, you sit down and have some yerba mate tea. That might take an hour, and you’ll be talking about life, the children, your project. You work a little bit. Then you take a long lunch, sit and eat and chat. Later someone comes by, and everyone is diverted. Their fence is broken and they need to get their cows in. So you abandon the project that you’re working on, and wind-up at the other person’s house for the rest of the day. They invite you to stay for barbeque that evening. You never know what is going to unfold in a day.

As an American having these agendas all my life, I found that they didn’t work for me anymore. It can be aggravating if you have a plan. Maybe you go to the hardware store and get materials. And then the project that you think is happening today ends up taking a week.

At the mechanic shop that my brother-in-law and I started up, people don’t make appointments. They just show-up with a broken car, and they stay there with you during the whole time that it takes to fix their car, a whole day, maybe. Having tea with you, talking, watching. There’s never any “How much is this going to cost me?” or any worries. When it’s all said and done, there is some exchange of money that feels comfortable on both sides, and they go their way. They didn’t expect to have their car break down. And they obviously were able to go totally with the flow, without any angst over it whatsoever.

RD: Have you thought about how having a young family, when you are near to retiring, will play out?

BN: It will just play out the way the natural rhythms of life do in a family down there. And one of the things that I know for sure is that I’ll always have this family in support of my life. They’re very devoted to me. I get lots of neck rubs and attention and help with anything that I’m doing. This is one of the things, unfortunately, that people of retirement age don’t experience here in the United States; they often experience loss of contact with humanity, and isolation. In that society, the elders are respected and cared for as jewels of the family. I had the experience of visiting my wife’s grandmother on her 100th birthday in Paraguay. She died about 2 months later. My wife’s cousins had written a song. Paraguay has its own musical style, sort of like a polka. They played guitar and accordion, and sung a song of her life. It was just beautiful.