Small Caribbean towns of Necocli and Caribia

The last three days have been full excitement! My Mam working in chocolates, has amazing coco suppliers in Colombia and put us in touch with them. We got very lucky as our time in Colombia just coincided with one of the many community projects “Casa Luker” ( name of the brand) carries out and they invited us to join. The project: The company spent the last few weeks raising money in order to be able to provide paint to the small town of Caribia, in order for them to be able to repaint there houses. Caribia is a small village of around 300 people of which a third are employed as workers on casa luker’s nearby coco farm. The habitants of Caribia, looking to diversify there sources of revenue, want to make their town more attractive to tourism. The first step towards this, is to make the town more ‘beautiful’ by repainting the houses.

We therefore got invited to join a group of the casa Luker team who where on a trip from their Bogota offices. The first day we toured their coco farm to see their new innovative projects going on up there ( such as building sustainable ‘pod houses’ where people of all fields will be invited to volunteer and carry out research on the farm - this is also a pilot project, to test out the building process of these sustainable houses which will then be shared with the surrounding communities).

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The next two days we spent in the small town of Caribia giving a hand in repainting the houses. We were teamed up with the high school students to repaint the school. It was very funny as teenagers are the same everywhere in the world and the students were less then exited about the idea of having to do something for the school during their holidays…but they were very funny about this and spent most of the time joking around! They were also completely shocked by our lack of dancing skills, they couldn’t believe that we can’t dance salsa…or champeta…or Cumbia…the list went on. There biggest follow up question was how do you find a boyfriend if none of the guys know how to dance…god knows!! The town then organised a small party with a local band and the school kids who organised a dance presentation. In the evening we went out with the casa Luker team to celebrate the day’s work and finally got a taste of what dancing on the Caribbean coast looks like! If you think salsa is hard, you havent seen champeta yet!

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Before arriving at Necocli and meeting the casa Luker team I was slightly afraid that we would be joining in a ‘lets do something good for a day, take a million pictures and talk about it for a year’ big company project, but I was very wrong. The way casa Luker seem to carry out their business is truly impressive and takes into account many different facets on which their business has an impact. And in case I havent made the perfect pitch sale for the brand yet, they truly have a really lovely team that made us feel super welcome our whole time there!