A challenge!

Living in CICD is a very interesting challenge. Every day we have to live with many people with different ways of thinking, different cultures and different opinions. Here I learn a lot about respecting the space of the other, being flexible and accepting the differences of each one. Time management is not always easy because time flies here. We are always busy with Gaia tasks, with classes or with the rota (cooking, baking, dishwashing....).
All this it is also a personal and intimate discovery about learning to face our fears and insecurities. I love the whole experience, but it's not always easy and that's why I chose the word challenge.
Cristiana Garrido

Travelling in CICD

I’m Celia and I arrived to CICD in November of last year. Until today I’ve been doing my Gaia programme, collaborating with the school for being able to start my programme and going to India. This is actually happening in some weeks.
My Gaia period it’s one of the most intense periods of my life. Here, you have many responsibilities and many ideas that should be managed in the little time that we have.
Collaborating in the clothes collection for the College I’ve transformed into a much better driver than I was when I arrived here. I’ve learned how to use many tools which were unknown for me and to make a lot of things for myself. Before, I used to ask for a professional to, for example, repair my bike, my car or my kitchen, but now I know that working as a team and combining the knowledge and experience of many people you can have unexpected results.
It’s while living and doing things as a group that you find the best and the most difficult things here. Living the Gaia period in a community like this gives you the opportunity to share many different points of view and ways of life in a small space. It gives you the opportunity of feeling the days as months and to travel around the world while you are seated chatting around a fire.
This way of running a house so many people together made me understand words like respect and tolerance in a deeper way. The patience for making agreements with many people who have different, colourful and strong minds is essential, and mixed with the tiredness of the work and the English winter darkness has been all a challenge for me sometimes. However, the will of agreement and a peace in our common living has been always stronger than our individual minds.
Celia Lopes

My feelings in CICD

I came here exactly 20 days ago maybe for some people it seems a little time, but for me it is enough time to be sure that I didn´t make a mistake coming here.
I felt really love for this place since the first moment I arrived because it is all green,very big, everything is open, it is like living in the middle of the forest!! You can see nature everywhere!!!! For me to breathe fresh air from the window of my room is like a dream!!
We are many people living together. We are living in separate buildings and in rooms fully equipped.
We all share the house work and the responsabilities. Every week the rota is organised with the tasks. This is fair because everyone has to do something for our school and home, and then you can feel more a part of this. I really like how all together we run the school!!!
There are many tasks to do in running the school. Some are more physical and for others you need to to think and have patience. This is fine because we are learning a lot of different and new things everyday. I am glad for this. For example - we are from different places and it is nice because we can share our culture, food and of course our way to see the things.
The most difficult thing for me it is to find the time for being alone with myself, because here everything is very intensive and I am a very social person but every day I need my space too.
My biggest challenge I think it is learning better English. I need this, but here we are many Spanish people and it´s easy to speak Spanish with them.
I am very happy to be here. It has always been my dream to go to India as a volunteer, but I had never imagined being in a school of cooperation like this and I am so satisfied with my decision because I am sure it will be an experience that will make me grow in all aspects of my life.
I don't know which person I will be in the future, but for sure I won't be the same person who came here 20 days ago.
We need to remember that we are very lucky people for be here learning a lot of things!! We will never forget this experience so LET´S ENJOY IT ALL TOGETHER!!!!

Irene Sánchez

I started in September, but it seems as if I started a long time ago.. And why? Because in this short period of time I got the chance to meet a lot of new people from all around the world, I learned a lot from them and also about myself. I come from a large family, but that is nothing compared to this! We are all sooo different and although we all have bad days sometimes, there’s something really fantastic about this community!
After waking up, I go to the promotion office. To raise my scholarship for the project, I help with promotion for our programmes here. My days actually look pretty similar to each other. I get in touch with the people all around the world and introduce them to our programmes. It might seem easy, but actually it can be pretty chaotic here, believe me. I try to improve my skills, meanwhile I gain a lot of knowledge about the programmes, the school and the people around me.

Then, if I am in the rota I go to prepare the dinner (imagine when we are 40 people!!), or participate in the cleaning action, but most of the time I go to the Gaia class from 5 to 6 o’clock.
Fortunately, I am in an amazing Gaia Team! After a long day we all have one study hour where we can learn about the environment while we do as many practical actions as we can. A few weeks ago we went to the nearest cities, Hull and Withernsea, to make a little investigation about the life of people in Britain. Our aim was to find out how people in UK manage to live, how hard they find to get a job or pay the taxes... etc. I will be in the Poverty Activist Team, so for me, it was quite interesting.

Making natural soap

Preparing for baking bread

Hull investigations

When it is not time to go out during the Gaia classes, we stay in the school and make practical things, like presentations or we share our knowledge with each other. One day for example we tried to make organic soap… well it was not a big success, but at least we tried! We also started to make compost again. The school had to stop doing it a few months ago. But now, we have a new strategy, so hopefully it will work better.
We also try to spend the study hour with learning about ourselves. We make presentations about things the team are most likely interested in and share those things with each other. Last time one of our students made a presentation about numerology. Another time we got an insight in the life of Frida Kahlo de Rivera, a Mexican painter, who mostly painted self-portraits. She used a naïve folk art style to explore questions of identity, post-colonialism, gender, class, and race in her society, and as an extra, we had to paint our faces. Even though the results were not really the ones people expected, we had a really funny and relaxing time together!

Besides the theoretical studies one of our main goals is to make the team stronger. We will go to the projects in Africa or India together in Trios, so for that we have to get to know each other as much as it’s possible and in case of misunderstandings we have to try to solve the problems between us. To deal with these team issues is hard, believe me, but this is the exact reason we are a strong and wonderful team! We support each other.
It has been a big change what we all undertook, but if we stick together nothing is impossible for us.

"Why can't people just agree to make a better world?"

Gaia Team Study Weekend May 2016

The 7th-8th May we had the monthly Gaia Study Weekend in our school. During this period, the subject that all the Gaia’s were working with was: “Why can’t people just agree to make a better world?”.
To work with this question we split the class in 5 groups and we tried to focus our presentations on “What are the most important factors that are the hindrances for people to joining hands? ”. After sharing our opinion with the rest of the students, we established 5 factors as the most influencial factors in our society:

• Money
• Greed
• Comfort
• Education
• Fear

In my group's presentation we were talking about how the money affects our way of life, and how money is related with the rest of the factors. After a short introduction about the historical reasons for the money as a hindrance for people to joining hands, we put two examples of initiatives who are trying to change this fact.

1. Exchange markets

In these places the people can "buy" things without money, just exchanging with things that they don't need or don't use anymore. The main objective of these markets is to make these alternative spaces of consumption become a form of real savings based on the three 'R's: Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. This kind of initiatives want to give a second life to objects that are in good condition but no longer in use. So things go from hand to hand, covering real needs - without exchange of money.

These markets can be found in a lot of cities around the world. One example in Zaragoza (Spain) is called "Exchanging market: changing things to change the things. No money, no crisis". There is also “The Barter Market” in Mexico City, where to reduce waste production and promote the development of local products. This exchange programme is based on the system of “Green Points”. It means that your inorganic waste is collected and sent to different companies specializing in recycling, and this way they can be reused and changed. This gets you “Green Points” with which you can buy locally grown fresh food.

2. Time Banking

Another example of these non-money initiatives are the programmes about sharing time. There is a time bank, where  you can select that interests you and sign up to offer "your hours" in exchange for those of others. This is a way for people to come together, a way of making your time, your  skills and your knowledge available to other users by giving practical help and support, and at the same time, choose the specialties of others. One example of these is the http://www.timebanking.org in UK, but nowadays, we can find these examples in many other cities around the world.

So either for economic reasons, or because of belief in an economic and social system based on sustainability and responsible consumption, the fact is that, the exchange of goods, services or knowledge without money is spreading. It gives us a way to acquire, enjoy or learn, and each day more people are convinced to use this new way instead of money.
This is certainly a good sign of social maturity that of course we must respect and promote.

Marta Penadés Cortell,
Gaia Team 2016