La Villa de Arcilla is a sustainable eco-village based in Northwest of Costa Rica centered upon their founding members: a Jewish-Muslim couple committed to ecological living and interfaith peacebuilding. Their work centers on education of survival skills that go back to the basics—building dwellings from natural materials, sourcing clean water and food from nature, and building community around these practices. As members of URI Multiregion, they plan to host interfaith and ecological retreats, earth architecture and sustainable agriculture workshops, and provide a space for shamanistic healing ceremonies. This community, formed by Jews, Muslims, Christians, and indigenous spiritualties in a very international part of Costa Rica, is an example of different groups getting along. In the community, people learn to live in harmony with each other by learning to live in harmony with nature. The desire is to broaden the sense of family/community to encompass everyone through their shared environmental vulnerability/responsibility and to achieve self-awareness through ecological awareness. They have already built two earth houses. One is was off-the-grid near the largest Native American Reservation in California with solar electricity, spring (not well) water, and natural farming and the other one in Costa Rica with a hand-dug well. Community members believe that people’s universal needs are being met through abundance and they have an off-the-grid attitude of abundance. They plan to have a school through hosted workshops, apprentices to teach people how to get food water and shelter, and also security. This school will be open to the general public, locals, foreigners anyone who wants to know the information.
