Otesha on stage.
Participants in the Otesha Project's "Phenomenal Food" bike tour perform a skit for students at St. John Catholic High School on June 14. The group of 14 made the stop as part of its nearly two-month trip from Kitchener/Waterloo to Ottawa, where they were due to arrive June 22.
Geoff Davies
There were 14 bikes resting at the side of the house and laughter coming from the backyard.
Vegetarian pizza and an eggplant stir-fry (or, what remained of them) lay on a makeshift table, supported by carpenter’s horses. Around it lounged the bikes’ owners – easily identified by their sunburned smiles and sculpted leg muscles – their hosts for the evening, and the friends they had made that day in Perth.
No doubt about it, this reporter had found the Otesha crew.
These 14 people, aged 19 to 28, had been on the road since the beginning of May, making their way to Ottawa from Kitchener/Waterloo, where they were due to arrive June 22.
They are ambassadors of the Otesha Project and, like many other groups before them, they are on a bike tour, learning about themselves, each other, and sustainable community-living.
Along the way, they visit schools and community spots to spread the project’s message, using theatre to show how building communities, making conscious lifestyle choices, and reducing consumption can lead to a more sustainable future.
This crew is from across Canada and around the world – from Cleveland, to Calgary, to Hong Kong – and they call themselves the “Phenomenal Food” tour. They’re making stops along their nearly two-month trek to volunteer at farms, learning about where food comes from and the impact of our menu choices.
June 14 brought them to Perth, where they performed to students at St. John Catholic High School.
On June 15 they took their bikes and their ideas to Smiths Falls, and they planned to wake up at 4:30 a.m. to make it to their morning performance on-time.
With an itinerary like this, it’s no wonder the riders feel a strong need to fuel up.
“You know the food is good when we’re fighting over the scraps,” says Kira Burger as she corrals pizza crumbs into the corner of the pan.
Burger worked as a staff member on the Otesha Project earlier this year, and played a large role planning the group’s trip. Now, though, she’s just a volunteer like everyone else, not the leader or the boss. Part of the Otesha experience, she says, is learning to live and make decisions as a community, so it’s important the hierarchy is flat.
They rotate responsibilities and tasks – with titles like “Morale Meister” and “Time Wolf” – and turn dinner-time into a team sport: the “Awe-inspiring Sycamores” versus the “Cooking Crocodiles”, to name one match-up. But life on Ontario’s highways is not like a day at summer camp. It’s hard.
As the meal wraps up and the sun sinks, the group’s tales come out: perilous stretches of highway, where 18-wheelers bombarded them; situations where they were stranded and behind schedule, with team-members vomiting from exhaustion; and pre-dawn wake-up calls, which seem to be the norm.
Not a walk in the park, to be sure, but that’s not the hardest part, they agree. It’s getting up in front of a room of high school students, apathy hanging thickly in the air, and having to run a workshop or perform a skit after weeks on the road.
“We try to sow hope in the children, and we try to keep a lot of hope ourselves. Because sometimes it’s tough,” says Danielle d’Entremont.
Hope – that the world can be a better place, that habits can change, that the children are listening to what they have to say – is a cornerstone of their quest. After each student session, the group leaves behind “Hope Postcards”, inviting the students to write Otesha to share one thing in their life they want to do differently, from riding their bikes more to buying more local food.
The most rewarding part of the journey, they say, is after a performance, mingling with students, and getting bombarded with their questions and ideas.
“Our main message is the choices you make every day impact the world around you, and you can use those choices to make a positive impact rather than a negative one,” Burger says.
To say they practice what they preach wouldn’t be quite right. Instead, they seem to re-learn the value of caring people and conscious choices every day.
The best teachers?
People they meet along their way, people who open up their homes, fridges, wallets, showers, garages or trucks to help out, because they believe in what these young people are about. The countless acts of kindness are not lost on this Otesha squad.
“It’s hard to put into words how inspirational and how educating and how wonderful people can be,” says Ian Wearmouth.
“When you’re in your daily grind…you don’t really interact with people and you don’t really notice the love that’s out there.”
For more information, check out www.otesha.ca.