An ecological family living in Berlin

In January 2010, Nicola Zolin, Benjamin Lesage and I, Raphael Fellmer, departed from The Hague (Netherlands) and set off on our ‘Journey of Humanity’ without any money, hitchhiking over sea and land, from Europe to Mexico.

To go on this path that had not yet been trodden turned out to be a true adventure from the very first moment. It was only made possible thanks to the thousands of people that, wherever we ca¬¬me to meet them, gave us their trust, their food, and their love. In Mexico, Nieves Palmer, a girl from Mallorca that had joined us in Guyana, became pregnant, and after having travelled 32,000 kilometres over land and water with over 500 vehicles in fifteen months, we went back to Berlin.

These fifteen months changed our lives completely. Already while crossing the Atlantic a second time, we felt that we didn’t want to, or even weren’t able to participate any longer in the excess-consumption society we live in. No more consumption, no more looking away from the billions of people that suffer from hunger every day. We decided to maintain our money strike in order to raise awareness of (bring attention to) the injustice, the suffering and the destruction of the environment, and at the same time to find possible solutions that enable a life more in peace and harmony with people, animals and nature.

The basement of our good friends’ house in Kleinmachnow, not far outside the gates of the capital, became our new home, and our family life started when Nieves gave birth to our dear daughter Alma Lucia, a gift from heaven.

The Freedom of Choice or the Choice to be Free

Since a couple of centuries the freedom of the people changed dramatically, from servants, slaves, hard working peasants, factory workers etc. towards a week of just 5 working days and in many parts of the world with “only” 8h of actual working time per day. It seems that the humans jumped out of the slavery box into a new one, a box which is transparent and with no text on it. We feel more free than ever, we can buy more stuff than any generation before us, we have tons of stores to choice our products from, more than 100 different channels in our favorite box, the television. We even have access to Internet and therefore basically the key to all information available online. We use cellphones, Iphones, Blackbarries, Calendars, Notebooks, Twitter, Facebook and many other mediums to stay informed about what is going on in the world and about what we still “have” to do.

We believe in the system, we believe to be always reachable, available, on time, because being on schedule gives us the opportunity to do more, to maximize our efficiency to be closer to our loved ones and the ones we just need in order to have more “freedom” of choice. But what does freedom actually means for us? Is it not in reality a hidden box of less freedom than any other box humanity was trapped in before, but we don’t realize it?