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.
|
