FINDING OUR ROOTS: community, culture, and sustainability
Our project was born with two desires at heart: to take root in a new culture and to experience reality outside of the big metropolis.
Rosa Shoel has been living in Toronto, Canada for more than 10 years. Well-studied in permaculture, she has lived on organic farms, which have spirited her journeys through Ontario, Central America, The United States, and Cuba. In each of these “glocalized” organic farms, she has learned new cultivation techniques. Rosa considers herself a defender of healthy and sustainable nutrition and a conscious consumer.
Today she works at Organic Markets around the city, selling tapioca with her partner, Rafael Mendes, through their company Tapioca Gourmet. After a year of working with tapioca, she felt a calling to travel to Brazil to reconnect to her cultural roots and learn more about the cultivation of the manioc or cassava plant- the plant from which tapioca is made.
Raquel Dabarra is a graduate in historia, journalism and cinematographic documentary. After several years of working as a video editor in Rio de Janeiro, she decided to move to Toronto to study holistic nutrition. Tired of spending her days in front of a computer monitor, she discovered a world beyond the big city, and Toronto introduced her to organic farming experiences. She bought a camera and started recording these experiences in her new world.
It was the meeting point of these desires and cultural interests from which DOZERO and ENRAIZANDO emerged. Rosa contacted a community deep inside the Chapada Diamantina, a breathtaking national park in Bahia, Brazil, and with this contact they took flight with their backpacks, a semi-professional camera, and a forty-buck microphone. For three months, they rode around the Chapada Diamantina and discovered happiness, adventure, but most of all themselves.