WEBVTT

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Some people think that the world,
society, is collapsing.

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We want to make a sanctuary,

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where anything
happening in the outside world,

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doesn\'t affect us much,

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because we’re here,
isolated from everything.

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It’s been a long time, I wanted to live like…
out of the city.

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I was totally in the system.

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For the first time in my life,
I really felt like:

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“Wow, I have my needs met,
have every need met,

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I’m lacking nothing.”

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The truth is that change
can be difficult,

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I mean,
solitude is not for everyone.

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But you eventually
end up loving solitude.

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It’s an incredible sense of calm.

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I’m 32 years old.

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I was born in the United States,
in the state of Connecticut,

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where it’s super cold,
and everything is super expensive.

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I studied at university,
I studied music, piano.

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And like many students,

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I was experiencing a lot of partying,
alcohol and marijuana, stuff like that.

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My health was deteriorating

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I had a lot of acne on my face,

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my energy was very low,
I was gaining weight.

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And I didn\'t feel good.

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So I started reading
and educating myself.

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I learned that a lot of processed food
from the modern diet,

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causes a lot of problems.

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So, I eliminated
those things from my diet.

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But I also became vegan,

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that is, I didn\'t eat meat
or animal products.

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I felt that the best diet for me
was a fruit-based diet.

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I was getting away
from the McDonald\'s life,

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and hamburgers,
and fried food.

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My life was changing,
and my friends\' lives weren\'t.

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So when this happens in life,

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you lose many friends,
naturally.

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I was getting tired of the cold,
and of Connecticut,

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and the lifestyle in the United States,
and everything.

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I decided that I wanted to live
in a tropical place,

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and grow fruit,
and start a community.

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So, I came to Ecuador
when I was 25 years old.

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We’re in Fruit Haven,

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an eco-village
in the east of Ecuador.

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It’s in the southeast of the country.

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We’re in the foothills
of the Andean mountains.

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In a very tropical place.

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We have more or less
650 hectares of land in total,

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but also, every year we grow
a little more, a little more.

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It’s a community of more or less
between 20 and 30 people.

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Every year, every month,
more and more people arrive.

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I had a different journey, I think.

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I started going in this…
direction away from the system, in a way,

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that I was already working from home,
for a few years, actually quite a while,

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I worked from home, and then
I wanted to start travelling and working,

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so I started to travel…
work like a digital nomad.

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And that was kind of the first step that I took
that was very unusual,

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you know, people never heard of it

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my friends were confused, like:
”Where are you, come home”.

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I’m like “No, I wanna see the world,
I’ve been home all these years, you know,

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just wanna go
and see something, and travelling.”

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And I think that helped me spiritually
to open my mind to other things,

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and to learn about new things,
and about different cultures,

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different languages, different peoples,
different ways, lifestyles, so

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I think that’s one of the reasons
that I was more open to this idea.

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Permaculture, I started learning a little bit
when I went in the direction of being fruitarian.

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I think it just became natural,
like, “Well, if I’m eating fruit,

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I should probably know about
how to grow it, how to pick it.”

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But it was very little at the time,
the first couple of years,

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I didn’t learn so much.

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Later, I thought about getting closer and
I started thinking about going to farm,

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so I went to work in Canada,
on a cherry farm, organic...

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But I didn’t learn too much
about growing it.

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I think that’s one of the reasons
that I was more open to this idea,

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of eating primarily fruit,
like...

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it became kind of intuition that
yeah, that’s how we should eat.

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We kind of came…

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Our relatives are apes, and they
eat primarily fruits and vegetables.

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And then I wanted
to find a community.

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So I searched
for raw vegan communities,

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and I read different pages, and the one
about Fruit Haven sounded interesting,

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so I applied
to be volunteer here,

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and then in December 2018,
that’s when I came.

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And yeah, I met Peter and
the other people that were here at the time,

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some volunteers came,
different people,

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I learned about how to plant trees
in this climate, as a tropical rainforest,

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and different permaculture techniques.

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The climate is mild,
you can grow the fruit all year,

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there’s always
something else in season,

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all year you can have
bananas, papayas,

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and then different seasons
throughout the year.

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And things grow really well here,
there’s a lot of water,

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a lot of sun,
and the temperature is stable.

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Those are the reasons that
I can stay here all year and be a frutarian.

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I was studying in college
to become a medical interpreter.

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And I had interned at hospitals,
and pharmacies,

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and I was on track
to get a career in medicine.

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But after a few months
of working in that type of a job,

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I quickly realized that

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I was experiencing a lot of
cognitive dissonance, like...

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That type of work
didn’t make sense to me anymore,

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because I realized that...

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people don’t get better in hospitals,
people don’t get cured,

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by that type of medical treatment.

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And instead, I was discovering that
the people who really cured themselves,

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from things like stage 4 cancer,
type 2 diabetes,

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they get better through
changing their lifestyle.

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They get better through
changing their diet.

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So the cognitive dissonance was so great
that I couldn’t work those jobs anymore.

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Instead I quit those jobs,
my family thought I was crazy.

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And I started to live
in intentional communities.

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And do permaculture,
learned how to grow my own food,

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as organically and safely
and healthy as possible,

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without a bunch of chemicals.

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And that whole process
really sent me down this rabbit hole,

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of eventually coming here
and starting my own off-grid homestead,

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and doing permaculture
on my own land here.

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When I first arrived at Fruit Haven,

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I just felt this overwhelming sense
of being held, of being cradled,

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by the jungle.

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I immediately felt like:
\"Yeah, this is home.\"

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So a typical day,
I wake up around sunrise,

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and I’ll work online
in the morning,

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I have a couple of online jobs
I do to sustain myself here,

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and I will eat fruit
and my salads,

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and I will also
work the land in the afternoon.

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And I have traveled around elsewhere,

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in the past five years
that I’ve been in Fruit Haven.

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But everywhere that I go,
I miss it here, I want to come back.

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And I haven’t felt that
with any other place.

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I’ve been vegan for 22 years,

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and a raw vegan
in the last 8 years.

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With some slip-offs.

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I became vegan because I want…

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I did it for the animals, actually,
because of ethical reasons,

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and then later I started doing it
for health reasons as well.

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Because it’s a prevention.

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I went gradually into this diet,
I felt very nice, actually.

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I didn’t have
any health issues, so

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I couldn’t see
the difference before and after,

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but I felt really well
with this diet,

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and with time, even better.

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I really enjoy this diet so much.

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It’s a lifestyle, actually,
it’s not just a diet for me.

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And I love it so much.

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For long time I was making recipes,
either cooked or raw, later.

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But it was private, you know,
just for family and for friends.

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But at some point,
I felt like…

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that I wanted to share the recipes
with other people.

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And, I mean,
this gave me a lot of joy, to share,

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when I see people enjoying
the food that I’m making,

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it’s really great for me.

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I think it’s important to have
a healthy diet,

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it’s very important,
and this kind of place helps a lot with that.

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But somebody needs to
have taken the decision to do it,

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because we see people sometimes,

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who “eat better” when they are in the city,

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and when they come here,
they eat the same food,

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they go to south side,
in the city, and…

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so it’s not like 100% that
when you go to the tropic,

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you’re gonna eat healthily.

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Of course
it’s a very important factor,

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and for the people who really want
to change their diet,

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this place here helps a lot.

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I am 25 years old,
I come from Colombia,

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specifically from the city of Palmira,
in the Department of Valle del Cauca.

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Before finding this place,
I’d never traveled to another country,

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in fact, I’d barely traveled
even within Colombia.

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I found out about this place
from a post on Instagram.

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I contacted them,
I sent them an email,

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and after a week or so,
they answered me,

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and they accepted me as a volunteer.

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When I got here, I knew
practically nothing about permaculture,

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but when you do the volunteer program,
you learn a lot.

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Pineapple cultivation here
is a bit difficult,

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so I set out on the task
of designing a...

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a fabric cover
that could protect the pineapples,

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to avoid diseases and worms.

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I had to design something like this,

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and it seems that it’s worked,

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because I\'ve had pretty good,
healthy pineapples.

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I changed my diet in Colombia.

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In Colombia I was already following
a more or less fruitarian diet for about two years.

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And in fact, I’d changed my diet
because I had been quite ill,

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and followed this fruitarian diet,
for about two years, in Colombia,

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so... I was looking for
different ways to heal myself.

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And that was one of the reasons
I was looking for another place too,

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and when I saw their Instagram account
I was like, \"Wow, this is my place.\"

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So I did everything I could
to get here.

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The transformation was incredible.

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I used to be the person
who went to the gym,

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and drank a lot of protein shakes,

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and I was… bigger,
with more muscles,

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and I changed a lot, my friends were like:
“What’s going on with you”,

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“You\'re sick”,
or something like that.

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And well, before that I looked…
healthy,

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on the outside, my physique,
but I was dying inside.

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So, I chose to be well inside
and not have good looks,

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but to live happily,
feeling good,

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and to reach old age
without any type of illness,

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rather than reaching old age
with diabetes, cancer,

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or some kind of illness,
taking pills,

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I don\'t want that for my life

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I think humans at large

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desperately need to learn
how to live more sustainably.

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That means we need to live more
in close, intimate connection with the Earth.

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Here in the forest
there are very important things,

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the food is growing,

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all the friends who live here
have what they need.

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We want to live in the woods,
with cabins, with fruit,

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we want to grow our own food,
without chemicals.

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It’s like a school,
we learn a lot.

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You’re getting to
know yourself more,

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and you start
learning your limits.

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My dream is to have many varieties
of fruits to feed myself,

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to live in community,
share with other people,

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live in nature.

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Hopefully people consider
this is a good way of life.

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I remember some people think:

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\"Oh, is it possible
for the whole world to live like this?”

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And I think it is.