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.

Waste and Dumpster Diving

Our modern societies are deeply marked by the abundance of everything, cars, houses, phones and computers...and food.´We have never been producing so much food before. According to Jean Ziegler, UN special rapporteur, human societies are producing enough food to feed 12 billions people. And yet, there are more than a billion of human beings suffering from hunger around the world. "This is why a child that dies from famine is murder." Ziegler adds finally. This tragedy is related to different causes, food is over-produced in Europe with large subsidies from the EU, as a result Africans can't compete and are obliged to buy European food much more expensive; from this over-production in the world, a huge part is given to the cattles who have sometimes a much better life than human beings - over one-third of the world’s cereals are being used as animal feed ; and finally the abundance of food in Europe and United States generates huge amount of waste.