Project Bona Fide

No walls, no door

It was my first time in Nicaragua. My first nights in San Juan del Sur I stayed at Casa Oro, the chill-yet-social hostel in town. I had no idea what that building would become for me.

Project Bona Fide, in Balgüe, is an off-grid permaculture education farm. Volunteers worked five or six hours a day, five days a week, and paid $250 a month for the education, the food and a bed. Mine was a slice of foam under a mosquito net in an open-air hut. No walls. No furniture. There wasn’t even a door. I wore one pair of shorts, no shoes and no shirt, and bathed in the lake. I did all the manual grunt labor: dug holes, gardened, carried water, fed termite nests to the chickens, killed scorpions. The toilet was a wooden seat over a container and two scoops of sawdust; over time it all turned into soil.

It was nothing like Chicago, and it felt strangely natural.

Design inspired by nature

Permaculture is design inspired by nature, and I studied it the only way that stuck: reading, asking questions, and getting my hands and feet very dirty. A composting toilet, a food forest, a roof that catches its own water. Each one solves a problem by copying a pattern something wild already worked out.

I started seeing those patterns as answers to problems in business and in society too. I also knew I was an infant in this world, and I wanted to keep learning.

Chocolate, by hand

In May 2013, at a home on the island, a local cook named Clemen invited us into her home to learn to make Nicaraguan chocolate. I’d never done it. I posted a photo the same day: learning to make real chocolate from a Nicaraguan boss woman, who wants some? Six years later I started a chocolate company in San Juan del Sur, a short trip south of that kitchen.

What came next

A week before I left Bona Fide, an email came from Victor Saad: he was starting a school called the Experience Institute. It smelled like synchronicity. I joined the founding class that fall and spent the next year turning what I’d started on farms in Costa Rica and Nicaragua into practice.