| My name is Ugo. I'm from Bordeaux, France. I'm currently an intern at Songaia. I arrived at the community in early May after an exhausting, but great, trip across Canada. Initially my goal was only to spend my time in Seattle and San Francisco to do some street photography. | I've always had an artistic background rather than a green thumb. However, I felt like I should not restrain myself to just photography since both the opportunity and the envy of learning about permaculture was also very much present in my mind from the inception of my trip. |
| I was introduced to WWOOFing by coworkers in August 2013, during a summer international camp in the French Département of Dordogne. For three weeks a team of about twenty people from all over Europe had been working on renovating (or rather rebuild altogether) an old unmortared washhouse. There, I met several people who had been traveling all over France, hitchhiking their way from farm to farm, learning new skills and perhaps finding their calling. I was told about how much those persons had learned about their experiences, and in turn shared them to teach others in such camps. | After all, my own experience that summer of learning how to mix mortar had been quite interesting; we had suffered a series of amusing mishaps during the renovation of the washhouse, mostly due to our inexperience, (such as people falling off the top of the wall into the pool or incorrect mixture ratios) but I had nonetheless felt like those mistakes, although seemingly obvious, would never me made again because that practice we'd been having in the past weeks had shown us for good the steps we had done wrong. |
| Since I had already acquired a piece of land by then, I was interested in getting some hands-on experience by working with people into permaculture. My experience of the previous summer was a key factor in deciding not to start my permaculture garden right away but instead wait to have enough basic knowledge on where and how to start. 
| The Pacific Northwest region had always been of interest to me; I had visited Seattle back in 2004 and immediately had the feeling that I would come back someday. Only this time I had a strong desire to also start my permaculture project, so I signed up on the American version of the WWOOFing network and started locating places situated around the Seattle metropolitan area, not too far away from Seattle in order to get there in a short amount of time. I arrived in Seattle and couch-surfed there for a few days before meeting up with Patricia in Bothell where she picked me up. Before taking the bus to meet her, I was almost certain I would miss the right stop, but it turned out that I amazingly succeeded in reaching Bothell college on time. Patricia showed me around and introduced me to some of the residents, before taking me to the little cottage where interns are housed. To be honest, I knew from day one that Songaia was the perfect place to start learning about permaculture, surrounded by people with the know-how to learn a great deal from. |
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