I had just returned from Colombia, newly single and definitely not ready to assimilate back into the UK rat race.
I didn't want to live at home (LOL I do right now), I didn't want to go back to my old jobs, and I definitely didn't want to speak English.
I didn't like the fact that I could overhear everyone's conversations and understand them. Colombia had been quiet purely because I had no idea what people were chatting about.
I wanted to continue my adventure of LIFE, practicing Español and dancing with Latinos in corner shops.
I turned to everyone's obsession... The internet. And what a gem I found. An Erasmus paid 3 month placement. This was when the UK was still part of the EU and there were incredible projects like this. I remember making my interviewee laugh whilst speaking Spanish and I knew I had it in the bag.
I got free Spanish lessons, free accommodation, a stipend and I got to live and work in Sevilla. I just had to pay for flights to get there.
Vamonos!!
I met so many rad humans on this placement, some who I still talk to today. Everyone had work all over the city in a sector they were interested in. I lucked out with a lovely roommate called Holly, and witty Wolftown gal called Sarah at the same work placement. With whom I went on many an adventure with.
I convinced Sarah to cycle 12km with me to our work placement at Ecoeduca - a cute nursery with a huuuuge garden. Her Spanish was awesome and she was pretty much my personal interpreter for the whole time. Sevillian Spanish is verrrry different to the slow melodic Colombian I had been getting used to.
I thought I'd be learning lots about environmental education, and how to have nature as a classroom - and to be honest I just did toilet trips with four year olds for 3 months...
After those 3 months were up I wasn't ready to leave Sevilla. I had fallen in love with the flat terrain, cute bars and long siestas. My Spanish still wasn't perfect to get a job and the minimum wage was pretty low.
The only way I saw working was to teach English as a foreign language (TEFL), it wasn't really my passion although it allowed me to earn a living. So I trained up to be a TEFL teacher and taught private lessons to adults for a few months. I also got a gig at a local language school and my first class there was with ten 5 year olds.
It was horrible.
They threw teddies at me all class and I didn't know what to do. It was very different to the 1-1 adult classes I was used to. I remember crying that night and not really wanting to be a language teacher. I could barely speak English myself. I had to learn as I went along what an adverb is, the tenses, the patterns that have ridiculous amounts of anomalies.
I could have quite easily come home, found a job in the ecological sector and paid my taxes like a good girl.
And yet the €1 rioja and vino de verano kept me there. I feel incredibly grateful to have this chapter before Brexit. I could live and work anywhere in the EU. Now it's changed to just a 90 day visit and a special visa is needed to work.
I applied to work at a local summer camp, and well, I try to not have regrets... Yet this comes close!!
By day 3 a norovirus had swept through camp. Teachers and kids were dropping like flies. I went to speak to the director of the summer camp and she said they were just homesick (!?). She wouldn't let them call their parents to go home as she would lose all their money for the 6 week summer camp. It was like a horror movie. Eventually there were even news reporters who came to film how bad it was.
On day 7 we went out on a field trip, I was in charge of 3 groups as the teacher to student ratio was really out of hand. My first group's activity was to go stand up paddling. 5 year olds on a huge board with a long paddle? Haaa! So the captain decided to join all the boards together and hook them up to the boat. Everyone got a life jacket and we set sail.
It seemed like a good idea at the beginning...
We were all having fun. Apart from the boy who cried instantly and got put in the boat with the captain. And the few other kids that wanted out when they got scared too...
At one point I was standing on the board and all the kids around me were wobbling my board trying to make me fall whilst chanting "profe, profe". Thankfully my balance is amazing so I won that game.
After around 45 minutes of wild fun we were on our way back to shore. The captain starts to zig zag as if we were a banana boat, swaying to and fro. He made a sharp turn, and I felt my board tug on the rope and I went flying.
I was in the air for what seemed like eternity before hurtling down to the ocean surface. My knee hit the water and I felt a huge SCCHHHHRUNCHHHHH.
Fuck fuck fuck.
That's fucking painful. I was floating with my lifejacket above my face, trying to hold my knee. The captain looked back and saw that I had fallen. He stuck his thumb up and I stuck mine down.
I was NOT okay.
What he did next was also NOT okay.
He unhooked all the boards with the kids on. The 5 year old kids who can't swim... Then he came to get me.
He hauled me onboard. I am streaming with tears and the only words i could mutter was fuck fuck fuck. We went back to get the kids and made it back to shore.
The next part gets a bit fuzzy.
I definitely couldn't walk and I couldn't bend my leg. I remember sitting on a plastic chair with my leg elevated on a huge boat trailer wheel and a nearby Spanish grandma came over to give me a slice of her homemade tortilla. It helped.
This was the first activity of the day and we were hours away from camp. So I just had to sit there for the whole day watching everyone else have fun, whilst I was in absolute agony.
We eventually got back and I asked if someone could take me to the hospital. Of course this summer camp director was crazy and said that no one was available and I'd have to wait until dinner time when the kids would be eating.
It was around 12 hours after the accident that I found myself in hospital. They did an x-ray and nothing was broken. They bandaged my leg from toe to groin and sent me on my way.
Wtf do I do now?!?
I couldn't stand or walk. I couldn't finish the summer camp, or go to the festival I had planned to go to afterwards.
I phoned home. The trusty parents who are always there when you need them, rain or shine. And thank goddess they like road trips! They set in motion a trip to come and pick me up, and would arrive in Seville in 6 days.
I had moved out of my flat before the summer camp and all my belongings were on me. Thankfully Alberto was still about, an Italian dude from the work placements. He set me up in his flat and filled his fridge with delicious homemade Italian food.
After a few days cabin fever was starting to set in. Alberto had gone on a weekend trip and I was slowly turning into a coach potato. My friends came over with ice cream and briefly lifted my spirits.
I then remembered that past Harriet had bought Perota Chingo tickets. Blessings to her!! I borrowed crutches to go down the stairs, caught my first ever taxi since living there for 6 months and hobbled to the front row to see one of my all time favourite bands. I cried a lot. Singing my heart out on my own.
A couple of days later my mum and dad arrived with a cute picnic. I took them to my favourite park on the way out of the city. It was 43 degrees and we saw the ham cook on the car bonnet before our very eyes.
We stayed in Roquefort in France to break up the journey, and of course our room was at the top of a turret... I didn't have my trusted crutches this time. So dad found a Gandalf stick and I hobbled up and down far too many times.
We eventually made it back to cold 13 degree England, a huge 30 degree shock to my system after living in a hair dryer in the south of Spain.
I got a GP appointment the next day and they referred me immediately to the hospital (love you NHS). They decided to go straight in with keyhole surgery, as they knew something was up with my ligaments and MRIs are expensive.
My medial meniscus had torn and flipped over and then attached itself on the other side - hence why I couldn't bend my knee and what they call 'locked knee'. So they sliced it open, reattached it and sewed it back together.
My first and only time under general anaesthetic and my first surgery, as now I've had an emergency c-section 10 years later. I remember dreaming of dolphins and quite enjoying the morphine ;).
I couldn't move for 2 whole weeks whilst the stitches did their thing before dissolving into my body. I watched my leg muscles disintegrate day by day.
The right thigh had gotten stronger from a week of hopping and the left thigh had shrunk to the size of my calf. I had a bucket to pee in and a bell to call my parents. I was fully dependent on them, and my gosh do I feel immense gratitude and know my privileges of being looked after with such love and care.
I remember having a nasty cough from being scratched by a tube at the back of my throat. The coughing moved my whole body and it was absolute agony. I tried to hold in the coughs and anyone who's done that knows it doesn't really work and you end up spluttering.
It was the longest 5 months of my life.
I had a knee brace to wear and each week I could increase the angle to move my knee just 1 degree more. I became very self-conscious about walking. Not knowing if I was doing it right. Feeling paranoid that everyone was watching me walk with a limp. I had the worst cabin fever I've ever had from being in the same room day in and day out. And no delicious European hash to help with the pain...
What a strange chapter of my life.
Being bed bound, on disability benefits. Not my finest moment. Yet one that has changed my life forever.
I am more cautious. I take less physical risks. My knee still to this day crunches when I squat or walk up stairs. I need to sit down often at work, and take breaks during hikes.
When I eventually felt like I could stand and move around a bit easier. What did I do?
I decided to move back to Spain!!
Jajajajajaja
This time I had friends in Madrid who were getting paid very handsomely to teach English in schools. I applied immediately.
I was accepted a few days later and was assigned to a secondary school in Fuenlabrada. I booked an Airbnb for 2 weeks in Lavapies and decided to find better accommodation when I was there.
I moved out after 3 days!! It was tiny and gross, with cockroaches in my bedroom and no windows. The only blessing of this place was that I wrote my first rap song here - 'Bubbles'.
I quickly moved in with an Ecuadorian woman, who seemed lovely at first. And then the post-it notes started...
I couldn't do anything right in her eyes. I wasn't allowed to use any of the things in the kitchen, plates, cutlery, pans!! Nor the clothes drying racks, the hand wash.... It was a bit too controlling for me.
We lived opposite a community garden which was so beautiful and I loved looking at the trees from my balcony. I often sat there daydreaming about working outside in nature. Along all the walls of the garden there was graffiti, and on the day I was moving out they were painting a fresh new sign outside of her bedroom balcony... 'Fuck Off'. Excellent thank you universe, you couldn't have said it better!
Before:
After:
I moved in with a lovely Spanish elder, on the 7th floor in Embajadores. Closer to the train station making my 1 hour 30 commute into a 1 hour 20 commute. The longest commute I've ever had, in the only capital city I've ever lived in. Where people let you on the train before them. There's no pushing or shoving. People acknowledge each other with 'buen dia' and a smile. The train was roughly an hour and then the walk to the other side was around 15 minutes. It was worth it though... for €17/hour in 2015 and city rent was €225.
I was the only British person in the school. There were quite a few teaching assistants from the USA. I remember 2 being really friendly and funny. The rest not so much.
They quickly found out that I had a natural talent of leading a classroom and I went from assisting to teaching my own classes of 34(!!) and running classes for the school's debate team. My pay didn't reflect this promotion though! I quite liked just being an assistant, doing photocopies and walking the aisles.
When exam time came I felt the whole school shift. Kids burst out with acne. They started to pace around the playground. The energy was intense and volatile. Now understanding the nervous system, everyone was in the attic (fight/flight) and some were in the basement (freeze), and their resonance impacted the whole school.
It was so sad to witness and feel.
These teenagers had gone from bubbly and carefree, to stressed and anxious. Even after the exams they were still the same. Worried if they had passed or not, wondering what their score was. If they were top of the class, bottom of the class or if they'd made the grades to get into university.
I made a vow in that moment to never work in a traditional, industrial school ever again.
They wanted me back for a second year and I couldn't do it.
I turned to the internet again and typed in my keywords.
Environmental education. Yoga. Vegetarian. Sustainable. Green. Earth.
And what came up?
'Permaculture'
And I thought...
Hmmm WTF is Permaculture?!?
The more I read the more I was hooked.
Nature-based. Whole systems thinking. Solution oriented. Energy efficient.
The activist in me was turned on.
I instantly signed up to a two-week intensive Permaculture Design Course (PDC) that was happening a couple of months later just outside of Granada in the Sierra Nevada mountain range.
I just had another summer camp to survive first...
:|
To be continued.
Find out in the next blog how I went from a really shitty year of forgetting how to walk and not knowing my next life steps, to having one of the best years of my life.
Love and long hugs,
Harriet Daisy x
In the meantime while you wait for part 2, here's where you can find me:
Remote Garden Consult
Let's read your landscape together, wherever you are, whatever your soil.
Nourish Online Gathering
Monthly medicine for your inner ecosystem. Every first Thursday of the month.