This is my third year in a row of coming to Portugal and I’ve decided to put myself to work once again in an effort to keep learning as much as possible about building while keeping my living costs low. I keep coming back to the same area not far from Alpedrinha and Vale de Prazeres in the Fundao region, south of the Serra de Gardunhas. Since I’ve spent a bunch of time in this area over the past few years, I’ve met a lot of people and I feel like I’ve started to become a small part of the community.

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I’m back in the Fundão area of Central Portugal for the third year in a row, this time with the possibility of buying land a little closer on the horizon. I’m not sure I’ll be in a position to buy anything until around November, but I’m keeping my eyes open and if something great crosses my path, maybe I’ll find a way to make it work. In the meantime I bought a rather glorious bicycle, I’m reluctantly on the lookout for a car, and I’m slowly accumulating tools.

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I’ve spent a good amount of time at Keela Yoga Farm over the past couple of years, first arriving as a total stranger in 2017 for six weeks and then returning as a friend in 2018 for three months. Half of that three months in 2018 was spent doing a natural building internship (focused specifically on working on their awesome new community building) and the rest of my time was spent starting to paint a mural of a map of their land and also attempting to construct a compost toilet.

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Back in May I posted about my grand plans for funding my future Portugal land purchase and all of the adventures that will come along with it. Ah May… back when life seemed so clear and simple! Back then, I was 99.4% certain that a partnership I’d been working on with a business dude I know in Kenya was in the bag. We’ve worked together in the past and when he saw my first Kigali map, he seemed keen on helping me bring one to Nairobi.

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After about five or six weeks at Keela Yoga Farm living communally, working hard every day, drinking copious amounts of red wine, pooping into a bucket, and having cold showers I think I was due a bit of a break. Happily, Sinead and I had the opportunity to head over to my friend Keri’s place for a few days to help out and hang out. She’s been living in Portugal for a couple of years (making awesome natural products) and building up her property and her business and I was curious to see what life was like over at hers, at least for a few days. I felt a bit of time off the farm would be good opportunity to gain a bit of perspective, try some different work, enjoy a hot shower and sleeping in an actual bed, and to go back with a renewed appreciation for the Keela experience.

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I’ve been back at Keela Yoga Farm since the end of July, just wrapping up a six week natural building internship a couple of weeks ago. I was was here for seven weeks this time last year and I had so much fun that I decided to come back. They’ve been up and running for a couple of years and it’s an awesome place full of building and gardening projects and they bring in volunteers to help out. I actually didn’t know there was an organised internship type thing happening until my friend mentioned seeing it on the website. Since it was my intention to cram in as much building experience as possible into my time at Keela, I was happy to hear that it would be a set period of six weeks of building fun!

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I’ve been back at Keela Yoga Farm for almost a month and life is good! I was here back in 2017 too at around the same time of year for six weeks and I’m very happy to be back in this beautiful, fun place. Both times, I’ve been lucky to be a volunteer at Keela while they had natural building courses running. The course back in 2017 was run while working on their new straw bale house. This time around the course was run while building a fairly massive community building. I’ve spent a decent amount of time at Keela over the past couple of years and I’ll write later about this wonderful spot but, in the meantime, here’s my take on the courses.

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I’ve been back in Portugal since July 15th but I’ve been having so much fun catching up with friends and doing non-computer-y things that sitting down to write has been a huge struggle. I’ve basically been spending time with some of my favourite people doing some of my favourite things and I haven’t managed to plop myself down in front of my computer for about a month. The horror! My Kigali website has basically been neglected, my Nairobi map is stalled, somewhat important emails have been ignored, and I’ve been a bit crap at staying in touch with family and friends. But how can computer life compete with sawing and chiseling? It can’t! At least not at the moment.

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I’m in Canada at the moment, hanging out with family and friends, enjoying the toasty weather, riding my bike, and having a few weeks of laid back summer-y fun. I’m supposed to be working on my Nairobi map to get as much done as possible before I head back to Portugal in mid-July (and then onto Nairobi in late October), but it seems like most of my time is going towards navigating the wonderful and rather overwhelming world of hand tools.

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When I flew from East Africa to Portugal in late March my intention was to stay in Portugal for most of that time. Really, truly, it was! I keep saying I’m moving to Portugal and I keep popping up in various other spots around the globe. I promise I’m moving there but I seem to keep getting distracted.

My plan in 2018 was to travel around Portugal, check out certain areas that might be nice to live in, do some work exchanges, meet some people, and learn some new skills. One of the main skills I want to learn more about is timber framing using round wood (recently felled trees, basically) and, during my rather brief research I came to the conclusion that most of the people doing this sort of building seem to be in the UK.

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