Heyyyy I'm back to let you know what's up in Hopeland! After the amazing weekend that I spent camping, I started the week full of energy cooking! Together with the other talented people that were in the kitchen team with me we made pizza and it finished very quickly! The other days I harvested and processed chilli peppers from our gardens, drying them to make them ready to use in our kitchen and I even made chilli oil, my favourite! Then I started to make a shoe rack from pal

Heyooo The past two weeks have been full of different emotions for me. The week started by saying goodbye to Chiara, which I miss a lot :(. We accompanied her to the bus station and we shared a lot of hugs. Then on Wednesday it was the first day of outreach! Together with the volunteers from the current project we went to a local animal shelter to help: we built a fence, painted some signs and trimmed a sheep! About the work in Hopeland, it was the usual: maintaining the gard

Hellooo This is gonna be our last recap together. In the past weeks we spent a lot of quality time with the crew: we had an amazing dinner all together in a taverna in Argos and we ate a lot, even bringing leftovers for our dogs (because they are also part of the crew!). We visited Argos's castle at sunset after a beautiful beach day, we watched the Spain - France football match all together and made it more fun by guessing the result. In general we spent nice moments all tog

Hello beautiful people! Ready to hear our news? The past weeks we have been on vacation. Chiara has been in Evia, a small island at the south of Athens, and Cassandra has joined the group of Modern Odyssey in their journey for a week. We had so much fun and we had time to recharge and come back to Hopeland ready for the next Volunteering Team. This week we put our hands back to work, by finishing the new Hopeland signs and putting them on the road. We also harvested a lot of

Heyoooo people! We are back! We are full of news, in the past weeks two different groups came to Hopeland, very different from each other and we had very different experiences with them. One of the group worked with us during the whole stay. Together, we built a drystack wall, which is a technique to build walls without using cement. In our case, it will also prevent the erosion of the land. The other one was a project based on LARP (Live-Action Role Play) where we witnessed

Here are some updates from Ελπιδοχωρι: We started the week by welcoming the project Modern Odyssey, in which we saw again an old friend from the Gaia 2.0 project! With them we upgraded the grey water system that had a leak. Then we focused more on maintenance jobs: we renewed signs of Hopeland and we finally finished the roof of the pergola! In the weekend Chiara spent her time in Athens with some other volunteers from the project and Cassandra went camping near the beach. Ca

In the last couple of weeks, we have been experiencing how important it is to create balance in big volunteering groups. In the last project, some challenges helped us understand a different perspective of community life. Besides, we finally erected the structure of the pergola, in the Hood of Hopeland! A lot of work still needs to be done, but it is a big step! We also continued working in the garden and created some bamboo structures for climbing plants that will make shade

Over the past weeks, we experimented a really funny and organic way of ecobuilding: cobbing. We went to a local farm, where a friend of Hopeland lives, and he taught us how to build by mixing clay, sand, hay and water. With this mix we managed to build part of a wall that soon will become a bathroom! This workshop was really useful and was also a way to connect with other volunteers from another nearby community. At the moment, we are more focused on building the pergola in t

These last weeks have been different: the first volunteering group left and we had a beautiful last day dinner and a party. We spent most of the night dancing around the bonfire! Then as our rhythm slowed down a bit, we were able to spend more time with the crew and enjoy Hopeland in a quieter way. It was also Easter, which is a very important holiday in Greece. We had a long weekend and a small trip to Athens. Now we are focusing more on the maintenance of the place and do