Off-the grid, life away from life

Story by: Jorge Rodriguez Photography by: Unsplash Translated by: Alejandra Palencia vie 30, Oct 2020
  • Off-the-grid, is that lifestyle in which people generate their own electricity, reuse most of their waste, and create a customized water treatment system.
  • Some move away from the city to live in rural areas. Others decide to travel the world by car, motorcycle or bike (even walking). The idea is to leave behind the normality of daily routines.

“Will it be possible to send everything to hell and get away from the chaos and stress of the city?” Surely that is a question that many of us have asked ourselves at different stages of our adult life, particularly in this pandemic times that we have to live.

The idea of ​​changing scenarios of agglomerations, environmental pollution, scarcity of resources, overprices and an everlasting etcetera that living in large cities entails, for more relaxed ones, with birds in the background, personal farming, sources of sustainable energy and well-being that only our imagination lets us enjoy, it is very attractive. And there are several ways to achieve it, whether in a van, traveling the roads of the world, or in a small town, where everyone knows you and modern racing is hardly there.

But how difficult is it to achieve all that?

Off-the grid is a lifestyle where you are disconnected from the network of services that a municipality can provide, i.e. water, electricity and waste disposal. On the Internet and on TV, you can find cases of people in first world countries, who move away from cities to live a simple and self-sustaining lifestyle.

Getting something like that is possible, of course, but it will depend, mainly, on how deeply rooted the comforts of modern life are within you. “It is difficult to generalize about the reasons and motives for which all people migrate, because surely they are different needs for each one,” said Francis Garnica, a Guatemalan sociologist. And although the motives differ from one person to another, as well as the goals to be achieved, there is a certainty that any of them will have to face: the uncertainty of experiencing something new.

Franco Busso and his girlfriend, Olga, met on the road 6 years ago, and have traveled the world ever since. Photo: Wild Routes

The first thing one encounters when leaving the known world behind are the obstacles that your head poses. “There is a lot of fear of what one does not know,” said Franco Busso, an Argentine man who has been on the road for the last 8 years. Above the existential doubts of “what am I going to find?”, or “how are they going to receive me?”, the first one that stands out is “what am I going to live on?” And for the former employee of a commercial office in the city of his native Buenos Aires, the “I can’t” certainty that we impose on ourselves is one of the biggest complications to overcome. “Saying ‘I don’t know’ is wrong. It seems that you always have to know, and if you don’t know, at least you have to invent that you know,” added Franco.

Without a doubt, we are a product of our environment, of the food we eat, the news we consume, the people we frequent, and all of that dictates the way we face the world. “I left my house believing that the world was shit. I left and said ‘I don’t want to see a human being’, until later, I realized that the human being was the best thing that happened to me on the road,” recalled Franco, who even met his love partner after encouraging himself to leave  behind everything that made him unhappy. “I met people who helped me without knowing me. (Now) I see, with all the problems there are, a fantastic world, not because of what I read, but because of what I experienced,” he said.

To survive, Franco sold food on the streets, worked in bars, collected fruits in the fields and acted as assistant to film crews in countries such as Canada, the United States, Brazil or Russia, where his partner Olga is from. .

No comfort zone

Leaving everything behind, for a new life, is a process of constant adaptation. Photo: Zsun Fu / Unsplash

The World Bank states that 55% (4,500 million) of the planet’s population resides in urban areas, and that by 2045, that percentage will increase 1.5 times, reaching 6,000 million inhabitants. Besides this concentration of people, it is also the wealth that gathers (mostly) in cities. 80% of the planet’s Gross Domestic Product is generated in these areas, a reason that, surely, pushes more people to leave rurality behind.

This trend brings known problems, such as the scarcity and increase in the cost of resources such as water, and social overcrowding, which, in turn, brought newer ones, such as the concentration of those infected by COVID-19. The United Nations reported that 90% of positive cases in the world have been from residents of urban areas.

That was the last signal that, for instance, Delmi Arriaza needed to pack her life and plants into a truck and return to the village where she was born in eastern Guatemala. “I broke with the city after the start of the police checks (during the start of the pandemic). You couldn’t go out anymore, you couldn’t bond with anyone anymore.” And the restrictions made people in the city to feel “very scared,” said Arriaza, “because they do not know how to live without all the guarantees and comforts that (the same) city had provided until now.”

She lived for 20 years in Guatemala City, when she came to go to college, and from the beginning, the main thing for her was to create community. “I grew up in a place where you greet everyone, even if you don’t know them,” she recalled. But those people who accompanied her during her own urbanity, became insufficient with the arrival of the pandemic. The moment for her to flee came.

off-the grid

When moving away from urban centers, the pace of life is different, which requires an adaptation process. Photo: Heather Morse/Unsplash

Once away from the city, she had an aim of becoming more involved with the work of the land, and sowing new ideas in her old/new community, based on her urban experiences, but the difficulties did not wait. “One comes changed, with other thoughts of feminism, of agroecology, and people say “what is that?” How do you eat it? In the end, I asked myself with whom do I talk about those things? I have not found my space yet ”, she lamented. Despite this, she affirms that “one can create a community wherever he is, if you have the heart and the sufficient openness to generate links.”

Those links and that impact is something that we all look for, in all the things we do on a daily basis. “It’s like the algorithm of social networks,” said Garnica, which shows us content according to what new people we add to our virtual spaces. And without realizing it, it is something that happens naturally. “Whether or not a person exists in a social context changes the conditions (of the environment), however minimal their actions may be,” she added.

As time goes by, however, the worries diminish, one begins to find its space. “You discover that you can do things that you did not know you could do,” said Franco, and although “everything takes time,” because there is no supermarket, a grocery store or hardware store nearby, the adaptability each one of us, show us the way that we should take.

The protocol of a simple life

Living disconnected from modern life has an advantage: living disconnected from modern life. Photo: Gerrie Van Der Walt/Unsplash

“It takes a lot of paperwork to revive a dead man,” said one of the characters in the movie “Castaway”, once Tom Hanks, the protagonist of the film, returns to civilization after spending 4 years stranded in a deserted island. All that protocol to “revive” someone who was considered dead, you also have to do it to “let know” people that you no longer exist in a particular ecosystem, such as the city where you are settled.

In the United States there is already an established off-the-grid industry, for which many regulations and laws already exist. Primalsurvivor made a summary of these in each state of the North American country. For example, Pennsylvania and New York,  are two of the worst places to live off-grid. For example, it is illegal in New York State to have a solar power system independent of the state power grid.

On the contrary, those who want to live independently from the network of services such as electricity, water and sanitation, have more in favor in the state of Washington, on the Pacific coast. Rainwater harvesting is legal and there are already many communities that do it. Some counties even encourage this alternative system. There are also communities connected to their own independent electrical systems from the municipality grid.

Although there are many people in the world that decide to live off-the grid, there always rules to follow, and, in a more personal way, everything has an adaptation period. You have to learn, not only how the laws and regulations will affect you, if you live in the United States, and also, you must engage in dealing with situations that were not your concern before. “I learned to repair my truck. I became my own mechanic. (Before this trip), I had not taken a tool in my life,” said Busso.

The COVID-19 pandemic was the perfect excuse for many people to change the city for another less crowded and chaotic environment. Photo: Jorge Rodriguez/Viatori

As Francis Garnica said, the “motivations and realities” for which people decide to migrate are many, and they cannot be compared with each other. It is even difficult to find a way to explain them, because human decisions enter the “realm of philosophy.” What can be done, is to learn from the experience of all people, among which we must include ourselves, since we are generating a unique and irreplaceable knowledge, which can become an important part, not only of our own life, but also that of those around us. “The knowledge that (people) can transmit to you, allows you to build, on that knowledge and experience, new things,” Garnica expressed.

Arriaza also had to add some abbilities that she didn’t knew she would need before. “I had to repair walls, make a kitchen and a bathroom because there were none,” she said. Like Franco, she is learning to be her own multipurpose, now that she decided to recover this old family house of “about 170 years and that has been here for four generations of my family”, where she lives now.

For them, one of the most valuable lessons has been to value all of that we take for granted, even the smallest, and more trivial things. “Taking a shower or going to the bathroom sometimes requires a strategy, where you have to plan your day around it,” said Olga, a Russian journalist and Busso’s partner, with whom she has traveled the world for the last six years.

Whether living in the city, with all the comforts (and discomforts) that it allows us, or living in a truck or a little house in some rural area of ​​the world, the important thing, according to Arriaza and Busso, is to have a clear idea of ​​what one desires for ones life, as well as to be part of the community that surrounds us and to leave behind any prejudice or expectation that the system has imposed on us during our whole lives.

*This story was written during the confinement imposed in Guatemala, due to COVID-19
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