First of all, Masia la Torre is a great, very inspiring project itself, and during our stay there the athmosphere and the situation helped us a lot to work on internal group processes and get further with them.
At the moment they are nine people - 8 grown-up and one child - Manuela, living in the beautiful mountains of Aragon/Teruel, north-west of Valencia. They have a house which they rent from the city council for a symbolic price - under the condition to take care of the camping site next to the building. It’s very common in this area to find houses and land for small money.
For a field you want to do agriculture on, you pay something like 3 Euros per year - the government is happy to find more people using land as population is very small. Young people between 18 and 30 are hardly found - most of them move to bigger cities.
About five years ago, only three people lived there; the project as it is now started two years ago.
The project has three main ideas -
one is living together as a community - sharing their lifes in many aspects, caring together for Manuela, the child living there. Another aspect is becoming self-sustainable step by step.
They are already on a very good way in my eyes - half the year they supply their own organic food which they grow on three fields (over the winter hardly anything grows), they have goats for milk and cheese, chicken for eggs, just some time ago they started having bees. In some distance there is an olive-tree-field owned by an old man who can’t take care of it anymore - so they help him with the trees and therefore they can have 80% of the harvest. So they even have their own olive oil.
Every week they bake their own bread (according to a recipe from the community Lakabe in Navarra) for own supply on one hand and also for selling it to customer groups in Valencia as well as in a small shop in Olba, a village nearby.
Some weeks ago they started their own supply of electricity - they installed a windmill and six solar-panels.
So altogether they get along with quite little money. They earn some with baking the bread and cakes, some of them also go to work in Valencia some days a week developped a project where they work with organic agriculture in schools and a prison, which is financed by a foundation. Just during our stay there they restructured their financial system. The new one will be that everyone gives a certain percentage of their income to the community cashier from which on one hand they buy everything they need and on other hand everyone gets the same amount of money every month - similar to the system of minimum wage.
Their third intention is to be a social centre and provide infrastructure mainly for groups of Valencia, Barcelona and Madrid to have meetings or workshops, for example. For them it’s very productive to meet in this calm, far-out place where they can’t run away from problems as they can in the city and not to be distracted by anything.
They also try to interact more with their surrounding, which is a little difficult.
Especially with the next small village - Nogueruelas. Most of the people living in the small mountain villages in this area are quite old and keep thinking and living conservative ways of life - so many are very sceptical about the people of Masia la Torre, about them living differently, not having a “normal” job, they simply don’t understand their way of life. Noone ever comes to open events at Masia la Torre - only people who already are into alternative culture. Still, the community tries to improve communication and interaction with local people - last summer, for example, they took care of Nogueruelas’ swimming pool, organizing events and theater mostly for children, which they plan to do again this year.

For us as a group our stay there was very productive.
After some days both the people from la torre and us realized that there is some strange atmosphere between us.
For one, this was a result of our very different styles of organisation - Masia la Torre already has a very stable and well working organisation structure using tools such as schedules and weekly meetings seperated into those concerning feelings, others concerning work issues. While our organisation is rather spontaneous and from the outside probably quite non-transparent. This issue turned out to be confusing, mainly for the la torre people. Another aspect which caused this uncomfourtable atmosphere was that in our group there’s a lack of common sense/intention which leads to difficulties for people from the outside to understand what the project actually intends, what it is. First the people from Masia la Torre didn’t really see us as a group being interested in their project, whilst they did see that single persons do care.
Some people from la torre have also been disappointed about our project, as their expectations didn’t match reality.
They expected that we would already practise our ideas and visions while we in fact are still looking for ways how to realize them.
So, feeling these things and getting worthful feedback we had a few internal meetings, in which we figured out some important issues - such as finding out our common intention, finding better definitions of what the projects wants to be and what it already is as well as presenting it in a more adaequat way to avoid next places developing expectations we won’t be able to furfill. We came to some conclusions about our goals and how we can reach them. As well as we reached the point where we finally realized that for the success of the project we need to find definitions and a clearer idea of how open we want to be as a group - so we maybe no longer accept someone to join who doesn’t agree in the projects’ ideas and values or simply doesn’t want to contribute in a productive way. (Although it’s a little bit hard for many of us to create this hierarchy where some people are allowed to decide what or who is “good” for the project and what/who not, and to even not allow people to join. But finally it was obvious that there’s the need for it.)
But our stay has not only had this difficult site, we also had lots of great experience - we had good exchange with the people as well as fun and nice conversation including language troubles and finding ways how to communicate elseways.
We helped with some tasks (like building a stone wall, repairing the outside wall of the oven, collecting goat manure) and learned about baking bread, we had a workshop about non-violent communication and another one about the renewal of the Kyoto-protocol in Kopenhagen in 2009. Oh, and not to forget the nice new-years-eve we spent together - including some games using the language barrier as a tool for communication and the spanish tradition of eating twelve grapes at twelve o’clock - one for each bell ringing which should bring luck.

The time we spent there was more a time we needed “intern” our group to find solutions for our own and reflect the things we still did on the tour, where we are now and where we want to go,
than to be active interreacting with the local project group and the community.
on one way it was a bit sad that we didnt manage a good communication and time with the people there and were the most time seperated and closed in our group.
but on the other side it was necessary and also a good place to do this,
at the end we had a good and open conversation with the people there, who reflected the point of few on our group “from outside” how we seemed for them.
we also reflected both eachother (their group and ours) how we felt in this time, and why the communication between the groups didnt work so well.
all in all it was good experiences and needed groupprocesses.

at the end: pierre and marcus left with their bus the tour to go their own way, and leave to germany back soon,
and henry who joined the tour since lyon left in cause of the groupprocesses.

the colourful bus from sweden and the other girls who stayed in barcelona, came very spontanious to the place, one night befor we wanted to leave. the bus broke down some kilometeres in front of the project.
the girls decided not to follow the tour further, and travel on their own to the south.
at the next day, we left in a beautiful sunset and drove into the night, in direction of the next places we didnt know to this time for sure

things to add to this article:

* networkingmeeting between communities they organize,
for exchanging experiences, comunication and organisation in communities, groupprocesses, to learn from each other

* tsolife-workshop and interesting exchange about educationnetworks and networking communities,
very interested in the questionary we worked out and we want to develop further and use with more focus on it

———
About the infamous “Shit Trip” By Sam

one work we helped in the community was the shit-trip

we got up very early.
after a good breakfast we went out in beautiful morning,
the rising sun, coloured the beautiful mountain-landscape in a soft red, purple and orange light,
a few clouds in the far looked like huuge mountains,
we put spates and working-cloths into the cars ,
and drove with 2 vans up the mountains,
small roads and a lot of curves lead us to the top of the hills where we were able to look down on all the valleys,
it was like taking off with a plane,
and oceans of colourful clouds at the horizont below us.

anywhere off the road we stopped, cause our busses were not able to go further the muddy road,
one farmer, who owned the place where we worked came and collected us with his jeep,
very fast we went up the hard road to the top of the hill,
there was a old old house of stones, very flat and huge,
this house is just for sheeps and goats which are living in the mountains,
it is sth like a sleeping-house,
at the day a sheeper lookes after the few hundred animals, and bring them at night to their house,

our work was to take out the old and dry shit of the goats, cause this is full of minerals and best material to put into the ground to plant vegetables.
the inside was very dark, there were no windows, just a few holes in the walls, where the sun shined through,
we put the spates and wheelbarrows into the house and began with the most last rooms in the house,
i imagined before that we just collect small balls of shit,
but that what we had to carry out the house was sth different,
it was the shit of a few hundred animals of one year what got pressed into the ground,
so the ground were half meter of pressed shit we had to pick out and put it out the house,
it sounds very bad and ugly, but it was totally dry and without smell and looked like dry earth,
inside many people hacked into the ground,
i got totally visions about old mines-workers who picked out gold of stones in the middle of a mountain,
i really imagined how there life was and how hard there job.
and there i saw the connection between them and our work.
we were like mines-workers picking out the shit of our shitmine
.. which is like gold for the people in the community.
with this golden-shit-earth they will grow alot of healthy food, they need for their life.
it was good to see that this shit is good work, where new life will grow out,

after a few hours and breaks we had a huuuge hill of shit infront of the house,
later a tractor will come and bring it down the hills to the community
we walked down to our vans and drove back to the house,
where the other people prepaired already warm and good food for all the shitmines-workers.

Last 5 posts by anna

• Marocco or lesson in going with the flow - April 16th, 2009
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• From a bus' point of view - November 17th, 2008
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