We made it to Drayton!

Hello from Drayton!

Start: Hidden Acres Farm

Sorry for the lack of correspondence thus far! Our first 3-ish weeks have been jam-packed (haha Otesha inside-joke) with training, performances, biking, meetings, sharing feelings circles, and not a lot of time. . .especially time combined with internet! Hopefully that trend will not continue for the rest of the tour!
My new Otesha team (family) of 14 and I just rolled in to Ploughshare farms in Drayton yesterday evening. Today we are at Drayton Heights Public School where they are talking about "The Power of Positive Choices" and are trying to fight bullying. We did our Otesha play in the morning and are doing 3 workshops this afternoon. After that we're heading back to the farm for a few days for a workshare (we'll be exchanging farm work for a place to stay) and our next rest day! Hurray!

 The last 3 weeks have been pretty amazing and inspiring but also quite challenging and busy. We met in Kitchener on May 1st and cycled 30k to New Hamburg where we stayed for the first week at Hidden Acres Camp getting to know each other and training with Katrina and Matt from the Otesha Office. We had a full week of wonderful workshops on such wonderful themes as bike maintenance, media kung-fu, safety, consensus decision making and of course the play! We also developed a "food mandate" that we are trying to follow so that we are all more conscious of our food choices and eating in an environmentally sustainable way as well.

The 2011 Otesha Phenomenal Food Tour!

We decided collectively to adopt a vegan diet for our communal cooking with vegetarian options (eggs and milk products) when we are relatively certain that the animal products are being procured by ethical and sustainable methods. So far we've had eggs from Plan B Organic Farm and we're excited to check out Mapleton's Organic Dairy later today for ice cream!! It has been difficult to suddenly switch to a vegan diet for some of the team members and the group has been trying out different things to make the food mandate work for everyone. Everyone is free to buy whatever they want with their own money but we are mainly trying to be more conscious of our decisions with respect to food. We've decided that no one is to be a "judgement jaguar", so everyone has been very accepting, supportive and accommodating to personal needs as well. Another difficulty we have encountered is accepting food from some of the wonderful hosts we've had. Some of our hosts have been planning events for us for months and we only just developed our food mandate 3 weeks ago so it is sometimes hard for us to get the message clearly to hosts that want to provide us with food. We are still working out the details of how we handle food that doesn't fit into our mandate that has been generously donated to us by our hosts. Although, personally, I think it's most important that we have the opportunity to open up discussion about our food choices and why we've chosen the food mandate that we have.
Last week was our first week on the road and we covered about 350km! We went first to Plan B farm, then to Ancaster Highschool for a few performances and to the Boys and Girls club for the night. The next day we had 2 performances at St. Thomas More Catholic Secondary School which went great! Afterwards though, we're still not sure why but a number of team members got sick and were unable to ride the 65km to Acton. We decided to rent a car to transport the 3 of us (Elise, Alyssa and I with Sam driving) to the next location while the rest of the team rode. By the time we all got to the destination another 3 or 4 team members had also become ill. Fortunately though, most of us were better by the next day where we went to Acton Highschool to participate in their water symposium. Then we had a couple of days of riding to Balidifad and then Toronto for a much needed rest day before the Organic Affair!

Outside of the house bus

Inside of Plan B's house bus!

friends forever

The Organic affair was at the Brickworks in Toronto which is an amazing space! We went on a tour where we learned about all of the amazing things they're doing with the old Brick factory and put on a 15 minute of our performance for the first ever time where an Otesha tour has actually been able to attend the Organic Affair (a bi-annual Otesha fund-raising event). The Organic Affair was great with lots of great people, speeches, and delicious brownies!!! We also met up with the Mammalian Diving Reflex, which is an organization very hard to define but are doing really interesting things with art as a tool for social change. One thing they do is called "Social Acupuncture"; they find contradicting ideas in normal society and making them happen (?) like haircuts by children! Check out the link above for more information, they have some super cool ideas!
After leaving Toronto we headed towards Etobicoke to Thistletown Collegiate Institute for a performance and then back in the direction of Waterloo (!?!?! haha). We went through Guelph to Ignatius Farm where we camped on the lawn for the night and had some delicious tea with the interns working there for the season. The next day we headed off to the University of Waterloo for a dry night in the residence and the next day, a 3 hour CanBike training session and another performance and workshop with the amazing Waterloo Unlimited Grade 10 students in the evening. We did 2 performances the next morning at Waterloo Collegiate Institute and then cycled a beautiful 60k to Drayton where we are now!

So I think that sums up our busy schedule so far. We've also had various rotating roles that we've had to fulfil in our group (some examples: meeting facilitator, time wolf, waste management, gratitude giver, etc.) and rotating cooking groups that are responsible for our food during the day.In all, we're getting to know each other a LOT better, getting better and stronger on our bikes, becoming more efficient working as a team and learning a lot through our collective experiences and tour stops about food, sustainability and the power of positive choices! Now all we need is SUN!!

Weeding at Ploughshare