He resigned from the comfort of his life to enter the jungle of Colombia to fulfill his dream
"The paisa."This is how Alejandra Liévano tells the inhabitants of Coquí, a corregimiento of Nuquí, Chocó, Colombian Pacific municipality with no more than 8300 inhabitants.
Alejandra arrived at the place six years ago to do a university job, when he was barely 19, and from the moment he stepped on Nuquí "he felt the call of the earth," he says.With its more than 1.70 tall, its long brown hair, its white skin and brown eyes, caught the attention of the community, but it was not another tourist of those that came to see the whales or enjoy the beaches.She changed her apartment, the internet broadband, her exits to eat with friends to a restaurant for dawn daily in a hidden paradise in the Colombian jungle and from there work with the community.She was in the third semester of fashion design at a private university in Medellín when she decided to inspire her prints on her final work in the Colombian Pacific.
"I was struck by the amount of benefits I found in the Pacific, but also everything that needed them, is a contrast between natural abundance, but also what is the shortage of opportunities," he says.
There he began to investigate more about Chocó and his people."There I said:" I have to go. "In fact, when I presented the collection I could not speak, I just cried, the jurors did not understand what was happening and I didn't know why I was crying, but I felt a very deep call from the territory, ”says Liévano.
He knew there was a connection that went beyond a university job, so in his next half -year vacation he bought a passage to go to Nuquí without knowing where he was going to get or what he was going to do.She had a return date for two weeks.In those two weeks Alejandra changed her life.She met María, a midwife of the municipality, who told her about the district where she lived, Coquí, who is located about 30 minutes by boat from the urban center of Nuquí.This little hamlet is part of the eight districts of this municipality.Alejandra returned to three months, she went and went every time she had vacations at the university, but in her visits "she lived a very deep feeling, from the root.""When I arrived in Coquí I knew I didn't want to go, I wanted to live in this place, that was going to be my goal," she says.
In his holiday stays he tookof children and gave women tissues to women, ”he says.The suitcase that Alejandra had with her clothes left her all in Nuquí and instead filled her with rice and panelites produced by the numeros, and she sold them in the city and sent them the money collected.
Alejandra graduated in 2018 with 21 years and decided to go to other rural communities in Colombia looking for her place."I traveled from La Guajira to the Amazon and definitely confirmed that this (Nuquí) was the place where I wanted to be," she says.
She had a bathroom dresses that sold very well in the city, had an apartment in the capital of Antioquia; Her friends, her full life was there, and her family who lives in Bucaramanga, the city where she was born and grew. She sold everything she had in the apartment and packed her life in two suitcases with which she arrived in Coquí to definitely stay. ”I had no idea what I was going to do in this corregimiento of 120 inhabitants where there are tourism, fishing and agriculture. People told me as: what does this Santanderean girl do here, as very out of context they told me, ”says Alejandra with a laugh. From that moment she call her paisa, although she is Santandereana, so she was "baptized" by the inhabitants of the town. For Alejandra's family and friends it was not easy It had a mission that is to promote all the knowledge of the territory, to give visibility, that people fall in love because we do not know the treasure we have in the Pacific, a very vulnerable territory, ”he explains.
But it was not easy, Alejandra found an abysmal change in cultural material and comforts.She went from living in a capital to live in a town with 120 inhabitants in the middle of the Colombian humid jungle.”It is a giant cultural shock.There is no time here, everything works depending on the tide, if there is high or low tide.The rhythms of the territory move according to that tide.It rains day through, ”says Alejandra.She came to live in a small room that had the only town store, where she worked at the beginning while she remodeled her house.She attended the town's food store and with that she survived.Look at the roof and find a giant boa or walk by jumping the snakes that was on her path became everyday for her.
"Understanding the context was my first task.Here you do not live but survive.The first months were very difficult, there was no cell phone sign, I could not communicate with my family and lived very worried because we talked for a long time, now there is already satellite internet and it is another story, ”he explains.But for Alejandra there are more positive aspects of living in the jungle than the negatives."Arriving here was to grow physically and spiritually, I could build a family of 120 people.I live in love with the landscape, of people, of warmth, they have received me with open arms and I appreciate every day. ”
The keys to the Paisa to survive in the jungle are based on improvisation and adaptability, “I live much happier here than if I had all the comforts of the city, but you have to live improvising to be able to adapt, I am the queen of improvisation ”, Says with a laugh. Alejandra has remained in the place attending the store, being a freelance online designer and dictating workshops at school. These works have allowed her to build her house with her hands in Coquí. "There are periods of economic abundance as there are moments that do not, but I have never lacked anything because when I don't have to eat a neighbor with a banana always appears," she says. The only time Alejandra was out of the community for a long period was the product of a leishmaniasis, which is a parasitic disease that caused the sting of an infected mosquito when she was collecting cane. She had to go to her dad house in Bucaramanga for three months for a wound that she did not heal since in Coquí they do not have a space to serve patients. "While there, many times my mother and grandmother told me not to return me, that I would work there; But it is not negotiable, this is the path that I want, ”says Alejandra.
Casa Múcura Foundation
The 120 inhabitants of Coquí became her family and she felt the need to help them and together with her best friend, Camila Curiel, began to work to materialize a proposal where the ancestral trade is valued because there is still a lot of preserved the value of thecrafts, medicinal plants, agriculture and gastronomy.Thus was born the Casa Múcura Foundation, a project in which the women of the town that have been taught to weave and transform the products that are grown in the region are linked to be sold in the cities.
At this time they have two active projects with Casa Múcura.One is Nuquí's knowledge center, which consists of a museum that built in an abandoned house where there are five exhibition rooms of medicinal plants, crafts, agriculture, gastronomy and fishing that can be visited by tourists.The families of the place rotate the administration of the museum every week and so they can have income from the guided visits.But not only are the five rooms, there is also a ‘living classroom’ that has become a space where the locals give crafts, kitchen classes, there are medicinal bathrooms.
However, the pandemic stopped the arrival of tourists and with it came a new project for the Foundation, the Gulf seamstress. ”Here they arrived and cargoes of donor mandbocas donations arrived that were going to end in the sea. Then with five women they began to weave mask by hand, ”he says. Alejandra called the mayor and proposed that she bought the tapping they were weaving and bought 3,000. This figure caused Alejandra to get out of corregimiento in corregimiento to recruit women. “I walked the corregimientos showing handle by hand so that the women who wanted to have work in the pandemic. We recruit 120 women who joined this work, ”she says. Thus was born the Gulf seamstress, for which they have received donations from industrial machines from friends and designers “who have fallen in love with the project and we already completed 10,000 tapping,” says Alejandra. After this came a contract to make disposable diapers, and today this has become a mission of mitigating the use of plastic in the territory.
This is how Paisa has earned a place in the heart of the Coquisoños, it is one more of this great family of 120 people, who alternates with her family in Bucaramanga, where she travels at least once in the year