Where you're coming for a more co-living type situation, or for a more short-term volunteering situation, there are many activities that need to be done for being off-grid.
We have no water or electricity connections to the city, thus are purely powered by a gas generator and solar panels to pump a water well and run all our electric appliances.
We are also fully focused on building an abundant food forest of fruit and veg using permaculture methods.
Plants need to be watered. Water tanks need to be filled. Shared spaces need to be cleaned. And so on.
As such, we aim for a flexible yet well organized schedule of activities for daily living off-grid that each visitor becomes part of.
Not necessarily in equal measure of activity, but where best suits people's talents, interests, and capacity.
For project areas:
Those with carpentry skills can contribute more by focusing their time and energy on wood work related projects and as such may do far less with the gardening.
For daily chores:
We also need relatively set meal times with a consistent enough rotor of food prep and washing dishes. Currently our approach is 9am breakfast, 1pm lunch and 6.30pm dinner.
When you arrive we'll review the rotor and make adjustments to suit your own personal rhythm such as 'no earlier' or times you need for web work, etc.
Then with the agreed rotor, you'll need to plan ahead enough time to help prep things for the scheduled times so people can plan their personal activities to coincide with the shared times.
If having a semi-fixed semi-flexible schedule or rotor does not suit you, you probably aren't suitable for our current volunteer or co-living situation. Try us in the future when we can be more liberal with people's accountability towards progress.
Project Time vs Chore Time vs Personal Time
- Daily Chores are generally the things if we lived in a shared accommodation. They do not help Camazotz Collective build the future per se.
- Project Areas such as construction or gardening or online marketing or running events are things that do help us build the future by making improvements that will be used by future guests.
- Personal Time is then your own time to do whatever you personally like and want to do, such as computer work, reading, hikes, meditation, etc.
The balance of these 3 categories seems to make up the right focus areas for co-living at Camazotz.
Camazotz Founder and current site manager Gavriel has a personal schedule that requires a lot of time spent at the computer, regardless of what volunteers are working on. Here's an example of Gavriel's schedule:
