 Hey everyone, it's Rob Greenfield, I'm here with Kyle and Jolene at Leica Tilan in Guatemala and I'm here at their Super Adobe Dome Build and Workshop. I'll get into that in a minute but I wanted to tell you about them because they have an awesome life, they are basically living their dream, traveling the world and right now building an off-the-grid Adobe, Super Adobe home. So in about a week's time they'll be living here. Some cool facts about them, Kyle has hitchhiked, has had over 400 hitches in his life, between the two of them, over 500. They've hitchhiked across Canada and back, Belize, Guatemala, Alaska, Canada. They've lived in a bus, turned into a camper, a school bus as well as campers and a sailboat for a little while. Jolene's a certified yoga instructor and has a bachelor's in kinesiology. Yeah, bachelor's in science. Bachelor's in science and kinesiology. So really rad people doing really rad things and I wanted to share your story and the reason I wanted to share their story is because it's super inspirational and to me it shows an example of being able to get out of the rat race or the life that's not the most satisfying and really follow your dream. So tell me what a typical year is like for you right now. Typical year in our life, we spend the summers working in Canada, working seasonal jobs outdoors usually. The winters we live in Central America working and volunteering and doing stuff like this and in the spring and fall that's our transition time, we travel between the two. So about work half the year, travel half the year. So you're both from Canada and you don't live a traditional life, you're traveling the world for a good portion of the year, going to live off the grid in this dome, why do you choose to live this way? I traveled to the tar sands in northern Alberta and I just got a real first hand view and experience of what fossil fuels is doing to our planet and I thought to myself this just can't be the only way we can progress as humans so I set out to learn different ways to live off the grid and to live in a good kind way with the earth and with other people. Nice. And I'm on a very similar path and it's really just about following your heart and choosing things that make you happy instead of just doing what everyone else tells you you should do. So that path to happiness has led us to traveling and living in a kind and gentle way. So I feel like for a lot of people in our generation the thing that really holds them back from living out like you're talking about is money. So how much would you say in a year it takes to be able to live this lifestyle of traveling and being able to do mostly everything that you want to? Yeah, well right now between the two of us for all the traveling and all this stuff it's about $20,000 US a year. Okay, so $10,000 a piece US about. Pretty much. So let's talk about this little piece of land. You got this land for $3,000. And then this dome that we're building which I'll show you in a second. This is costing about $4,000 to build this dome. So between the two of these we're buying the land and building your house. It's about $7,000. So for under $10,000 a Canadian or an American could feasibly move to Guatemala or somewhere else and live off the grid and. Totally. Totally. They can definitely get started for sure. And so otherwise they could come down here and live year round or the other thing is they could live down here for eight months of the year, work really hard during the summer or the winter and make $10,000 and be able to do eight months here and four months back home. Exactly, that's kind of our plan and it's kind of what we're doing already. Yeah, exactly. And some of you might be thinking but flying back and forth isn't really environmentally friendly but you can hitchhike or you can go over land the whole way. You can take the bus, you can sail, you can work on a sailboat and come down. Now what is going on here? Tell me a little bit on to the Super Adobe. We are filling these big sandbags basically with compacted packed earth. We take a mix of Adobe which is the right mix of clay and earth and rocks and then we add in a small bit of cement as well. That's what makes it Super Adobe and that's for extra strength so we don't need as much support as in buttresses and rebar. So coming over here you got the mixing area. This is where we mix up the different soil we have. We are using some combination of soil from the land as well as some earth that we got from a landslide nearby on the highway. So between the two, a bit of cement, we have a really strong mix. So coming up over here the dome is coming up as you can see layer by layer. We layer the sandbags and fill them with earth and then tamp down to compact. It has to be compact so that it will stay. Here's the inside, it's getting very domular. This is the bottom floor, we are actually going to have a loft as well for sleeping in up above and this is a high dome. We got a five foot stem wall, so five feet high before it starts to dome in. So lots of living space for this tiny home. Over here guys we got some tools. This is where we keep the barbed wire and sandbags. Barbed wire is added between each layer to hold the bags together for friction and add tensile strength to the dome. So without the barbed wire it wouldn't work. You don't need a lot of materials, you don't need a lot of tools, we're doing this all without electricity, no power tools, hand mixing just with a lot of hands and buckets and shovels. We decided to run this as a workshop to get our friends involved and to have more help building the dome. So yeah, it's a SuperDoby workshop where we're housing people for the week, feeding them yoga and together we get to learn how to build this dome. We have building instructors here as well and a local crew that's helping us out. So tell me what the plans are on this, oh it's about a fifth or a third of an acre right? Third of an acre. And what's the plans here? It's all going to be on solar power and we want to catch rainwater for most of our water and do a lot of, introduce the gray water recycling and stuff like that as well. So solar panels, gray water systems, rainwater harvesting, permaculture gardens, if we can grow a lot of food we'll probably have chickens too and get some eggs and stuff. We're just going to try to sustain ourselves to start, see if we can like build a life off this land and then once we do we can grow and teach people how to do that. So what would be your five biggest tips for somebody who's really looking to do something like this? I would say the biggest, most important one is set the intention. You have to have an intention and you have to plant that within you or wherever you like to hold your intentions and carry that forward. And then second biggest thing is trust and faith that that intention will unfold in time and the people will come into your life when you need it. And then the more practical side of things. So practical, I mean me too. So practical really what we learned is start small and simple. So building modular is one of the big lessons we learned in our travels. And so we're building one step at a time, maybe one year at a time. We had a building here, a building there. Instead of trying to build it all in one go and counter catastrophes, we're taking you small and learning from our mistakes and that way it's easier to think about and easier to accomplish, small steps. You want to find people who are doing something similar in your area and link up with them. Okay. So that's what we've done. Unity basically. Yeah and well over the years we've kind of found things like this. We wanted to get into natural buildings so we did some studies and courses in volunteering and that's led us to finding out about the people here. So we found people doing natural building. We volunteered with them and now here we are partners running a workshop together. And lastly I would say just do it as a community, yeah, invite your friends. You know we can't do this on our own. So yeah, if we inviting our friends doing the workshop, it's a great way to make it happen and it's a win-win for everyone involved. Nice. And if I had to add one, it would be live simply because the less you need, the easier it is to have everything that you need. So you know putting solar on this, if you're not powering a 55 inch plasma, it's easy to solar power this. You need all this stuff, it all makes it so much harder. And what about resources for anybody who's interested in super Adobe or Adobe natural building? I mean for us, we did train it with the Earthship Academy, so we learned about Earthships. So that's a good resource, Earthship biotech, so you can Google Earthships and hear all about that. Alright. Cal Earth too is another good one in California, that's where they pioneered and are building these domes. Not this exact dome, but cool. Yeah, this style. Alright. And then lastly, how can people get involved with your adventure? How can they follow you on the internet or find you? Yeah. If they want to come find you. When we have a Facebook page, Lewis and the Fireflies is our label and we also have a website. So it's www.lewisandthefireflies.org, so O-R-G. And then I have an Instagram account that I use called Sustainable Presence. Alright. Yeah. So the links to all those will be in the description. Check it out. And the fireflies.org. Again, they're doing incredible things. A couple of people down here with $7,000 about turning it into having their own land off the grid, sustainable living and really living out their dreams.