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Shares
Places are shaped by people. I met Soledad, a retired teacher, in the middle of a hot November afternoon in Hojancha, Costa Rica. We were recording a documentary and she gave us an emotional interview about how the climate change crossed her history and the history of the place. I observed the dog, the house, her grown children working at the yard. It was a time that passed by me with humanity in confluence to nature and a time that belonged to no one. Soledad told us that she was not born in Hojancha, but when she bathed herself in the Nosara River, she decided to stay. With an ostensible land exploitation, the river dried up and only managed to resurface when the residents - Soledad was among them - took over the problem and helped to reforest and found a forest park. While I was directing the documentary and listening carefully to what she said, I looked around. There were eight of us: me and another Brazilian, an Argentine, two from Costa Rica, one Spanish, one Mexican and one Chilean. Everyone stood there, attented, listening to Soledad, oblivious to our own life stories. The importance of living together, as a tribe, as a group, was underestimated by the human being to the detriment of the individual productive focus. Listening is an important part of being alive. We finished the interview, drank coffee with her and said goodbye. I will probably never see her again, certainly I will not meet her, but I will never forget her words of pride and friendship. Connections are forged with strong material when we place ourselves open to people.