In 2001 I bought an old farmhouse in Kyburg, Switzerland and began renovating it by myself. I had a profound interest in integrating alternative, sustainable technologies in that process:
- Adding solar panels
- Replacing the oil heating with something more environment friendly
This ideas turned out to be more difficult to implement at that point in time than I had imagined. The obstacles were mainly
- Costs
- Bureaucracy
My research on sustainable ideas started to become some kind of rabbit hole. One idea would lead to another. I’d find people and projects realising, experimenting with such ideas, technologies. My interest and my desire to try some of them by myself grew, but the obstacles wouldn’t disappear and it became clear to me that I wouldn’t be able to do these things in Switzerland at the scale I wanted.
Another dimension was my multicultural background. I’m half Swiss and half Turkish. I had spent my adolescence life in Istanbul and returned to Switzerland at the age of 15. Although Switzerland is a very nice and secure country I was missing certain cultural values of a ‘southern’ country like Turkey.
The combination of the above two factors made me think about moving away from Switzerland. Turkey was a possible option but I felt insecure about political issues and the closeness to the middle east, which unfortunately is full of political problems.
So I started to look around where else I could feel comfortable and somehow Paraguay popped up in my google research.