Please bring that s**** next time you come

Leila is a 29-year-old programmer who just arrived with her medium-size backpack to one tiny village in the Galician mountains.

She travelled from Morocco, where she spent a month, working remotely (online) for her company from Berlin. But before Morocco, Leila was living and working in the south of Argentina, and before that in the Alps.

This is a typical travel journey (just with different destinations) of people who come to our tiny village in Galician mountains in Northern Spain.

We are called Sende, and it is a co-living and coworking space, where people from all over the world come to work on their projects (online).

If you come to work from Sende, you will find here “village offices", gardens, and the place where we all cook together, play, hike, and enjoy the village life while everyone works on their “modern” stuff.

Typical dinner in Sende happens at the long table where 20 to 30 persons coming from at least 20 countries sit around. Every night.

Writers, architects, illustrators, programmers, designers, marketers, innovators, musicians, coders, ceramists, you name it.

And all of this happens in the village where only 20 older neighbours live.

But let’s come back to that dinner.

When our guests (like Leila) ask us if there is anything they could bring to the village, as we are located in the mountains, we only say this:

“If you can, bring one cooking spice, so we can try your favourite dish which is not common in Galicia”.

(Spices are usually cheap and small, because digital nomads travel light, most of them :)

Even though food from our region is delicious, and we mostly eat local specialities with ingredients from the gardens and local shops, we often eat world-cuisine recipes under the grape leaves at the big table.

Many prime ingredients for most dishes are easily found here, like potatoes, but what makes a difference is a way of cooking and the spice.

So, for Leila who is originally from Malaysia, but she feels local in Berlin, decides to cook Moroccan tagine (or tajine). A recipe she just learned. Leila wants to bring us the feeling she had at one family while staying there.

Most other people decide to cook their home country dishes, while telling us that they are far from home, but with this smell from the kitchen brings them back.

Cooking home dishes and eating together brings up so many conversations and memories, but it also sparks some light conflicts that at the end bring people together.

It is very common that people from 2 nearby countries “fight” over whose dish is this.

It’s even “better” when some discover that their dish also exists in another faraway country, and tastes the same, or even better!

This intercultural learning about food happens almost every week, and for us who work in the peacebuilding and conflict transformation world, these conversations are pure pleasure to observe, because you can see with your eyes how learning happens.

When people say: “Sh*t, all my life I thought that this was only our dish”.

Right after that they start talking about other dishes, traditions, and then they say, “A-haaaaaaa”.

Cooking your home dishes comes with amazing intercultural learning, if you do it in the intercultural place.

Please, bring that spice next time you come ❤

//Edo
from Sende