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| The Coziest Kitchen in Central America! |
In the July of 2009, I packed up my backpack and I took off to Costa Rica to spend a month as an intern at Punta Mona, a permaculture farm on the south Caribbean coast. It was definitely an off-the-grid experience, with very limited electricity and running water. The solar panels needed a part that was unavailable in the nearest towns, so the kitchen was the only area of the farm that we had access to electricity at all during my stay, and even there, we only ran the lights during the dinner hours. The rest of the time, we relied on candles and headlamps and battery- or solar-powered devices and chargers. You'd think we would have slept more given the fact that the sun set around 6 PM every night. Not true...
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| Holla! Who needs an electric alarm clock when these guys will wake you at 5 AM? |
In terms of the water situation, we used rainwater that was collected in a huge basin, located up a hill from the farm center. The water ran through pvc pipes to the kitchen sink, to the bathroom sink and the laundry sink, to the showers, and to the greenhouse. I believe we had a separate rainwater catchment system for drinking water, equipped with a filter. My knowledge of the exact workings of the water system was limited, for sure. But it was impossible not to be aware of the shortage. If the pipe from the hill came apart somewhere along the way, we'd have no water until someone found the detached joint and repaired it. Depending on the showering and watering of the residents, the water flow varied. It never blasted from the faucets, at most there would be a steady, small flow. More typically, a dismal, slow trickle.
