From the blog editor: surely many people remember the story of in the Kirov region - the initiative of the ex-developer from Yandex impressed many. And our developer decided to create his own settlement in a brotherly country. Let's give him the floor.
Hello, my name is Georgy Novik, I work as a backend developer at Skyeng. I mainly implement the wishes of operators, managers and other interested parties in relation to our large CRM, and also connect all sorts of newfangled things for customer service - technical support bots, automatic dialing services, etc.
Like many developers, I am not tied to the office. What does a person who does not have to go to the office every day do? One will go to live in Bali. The other will settle in a coworking space or on their own sofa. I chose a completely different direction and moved to a farm in the Belarusian forests. And now from me to the nearest decent coworking 130 kilometers.
What have I forgotten in the village?
In general, I myself am a village lad: I was born and grew up in the countryside, from school I was seriously engaged in physics - well, I entered the Physics and Technology Institute in Grodno. I programmed for pleasure in JavaScript, then under win32, then in PHP.
I'm from college times - in the center
At one point, he even gave up everything, returned to teach horseback riding and lead hikes in the village. But then he decided to get a diploma and went to the city again. At the same time, I came to the office of ScienceSoft, where they offered me 10 times more than I earned on my trips.
In a year or two, I realized that a big city, a rented apartment and food from a supermarket are not for me. The day is scheduled by the minute, there is no flexibility, especially if you go to the office. Yes, and a person is an owner by nature. We, in Belarus, and you in Russia, constantly have some kind of initiatives when people leave for the countryside and organize eco-villages. And this is not a whim. This is rationalization.
And this is me today
In general, everything came together. My wife dreamed of having her own horse, I dreamed of moving somewhere far away from the metropolis - we set a goal to raise money for a car and a construction site, and at the same time we began to look for a place and like-minded people.
How we searched for a place to move
We wanted our future village house to be in the forest, and there were several free hectares nearby for grazing horses. We also needed plots for future neighbors. Plus, the condition is the land away from major highways and other man-made factors. Finding a place that matched them proved difficult. It was not one, then the other, then there was trouble with the environment, then with land registration: many villages are slowly emptying, and local authorities are transferring the land of settlements to other legal forms, making them inaccessible to ordinary people.
As a result, after spending several years searching, we came across an advertisement for the sale of a house in eastern Belarus and realized that this was a chance. The small village of Ulesye, a two-hour drive from Minsk, like many others, was at the stage of extinction.
We first came to Ulesye in February. Silence, snow...
Frozen lake nearby. Around for many kilometers there is a forest, and next to the village there are fields overgrown with weeds. You can't imagine better. We met an elderly neighbor, told us about our plans, and he assured us that the place was great and we would fit in fine.
This is what our village looks like in warmer weather
We bought a plot of land with an old house - the house was small, but the size of the log cabin was captivating. At first, I wanted to just remove the paint from them and make cosmetic repairs, but I got carried away and dismantled almost the entire house.
Our house: log, jute tow and clay
And a few months after the registration of all this stuff in the property, we loaded our belongings and a cat into the car, and we moved. True, the first months I had to live in a tent set up right in the house - in order to isolate myself from repairs. And soon I bought five horses and built a stable, as my wife and I dreamed of. Huge money was not required for this - the village is far from the city: financially, and bureaucratically, everything is simpler here.
Workplace, satellite dish and working day
Ideally, I wake up at 5-6 in the morning, work at the computer for about four hours, and then go to work with horses or work with construction. But in the summer I sometimes prefer to work during the day, in the very sun, and leave the morning and evening for household chores.
In the summer I like to work in the yard
Since I work in a distributed team, the first thing I did was screw a huge satellite dish onto the roof for the Internet. So in a place where it was possible to catch GPRS / EDGE from the phone, I received the necessary 3-4 Mbps for reception and about 1 Mbps for transmission. This tightness was enough to call the team and I was worried that long pings would become a problem in work.
Thanks to this design, we have a stable Internet
Having studied the topic a little, I decided to use a mirror to amplify the signal. Some put 3G modems in the focus of the mirrors, but this is not a very reliable option - so I found a specially made feed for a satellite dish that works in the 3G band. These are made in Yekaterinburg, I had to tinker with delivery, but it was worth it. The speed rose by 25 percent and reached the ceiling of the cell equipment, but the connection became stable and ceased to depend on the weather. Later, I set up the Internet for some friends in different parts of the country - and it seems that with the help of a mirror you can catch it almost everywhere.
And two years later, Velcom upgraded its cell equipment to DC-HSPA+, which is a communication standard that precedes LTE. Under good conditions, it gives us 30 Mbps for transmission and 4 for reception. Nothing else presses in terms of work and heavy media content is downloaded in minutes.
My attic office
And I equipped my main workplace with an office in a separate room in the attic. It is much easier to concentrate on tasks there, there is nothing distracting around.
The new router out of the box covers about half a hectare around the house, so if I'm in the mood, I can work outside under a canopy and go somewhere in nature. This is convenient: if I am busy in the stable or at construction sites, then I am still in touch - the phone is in my pocket, the Internet reaches out.
New neighbors and infrastructure
There are locals in our village, but my wife and I wanted to find a company of people of our circle, like-minded people. Therefore, we declared ourselves - we placed an ad in the catalog of eco-villages. This is how our eco-village "Ulesye" began.
The first neighbors appeared a year later, and now five families with children live here.
Mostly people join us who have some kind of business in a big city. I am the only one who works remotely. The whole community is still at the development stage, but everyone already has some ideas for the development of the village. We are not gardeners. For example, we produce our own products - we pick berries, dry mushrooms.
There is a forest on all sides, wild berries, all sorts of herbs like Ivan-tea. And we decided that it would be rational to organize their processing. So far, we are doing all this for ourselves. But in the near future we plan to build a dryer and harvest it all on an industrial scale in order to sell it to health food stores in the city.
We are drying strawberries for the winter. While in a small home dryer
Although we live far from major cities, we are not isolated. In Belarus, medicine, a mobile shop, a post office and the police are available anywhere.
- Schools not in our village, but there is a school bus that collects children from villages to the nearest large school, they say, quite decent. Some parents take their children to school themselves. Other children are homeschooled and take exams externally, but moms and dads still take them to some circles.
- Corporate email-login works like clockwork, no need to stand in queues - just call and they come to you to pick up your package, or they bring home letters, newspapers, translations. It costs very cheap.
- In a mobile shop, of course, the assortment is not the same as in a supermarket - only the most necessary, simple products. But when you want something special, you get behind the wheel and drive into the city.
We produce some of the βhousehold chemicalsβ ourselves - for example, my wife learned how to make tooth powder with local herbs
- There are no problems with medical care. Our son was born here, and while he was very young, the doctors came once a week. Then they began to visit us once a month, now, when my son is 3,5 years old, they drop in even less often. We barely persuaded them not to visit us so often, but they are persistent - there are standards by which they are required to patronize children and the elderly.
If something is simple and urgent, then doctors are ready to help very quickly. Once one guy was bitten by wasps, so the doctors immediately arrived and helped the poor fellow.
How we launched a summer camp for kids
As a child, I had everything that city children are deprived of - horseback riding, hiking and spending the night in the forest. As I grew older, I thought more and more that it was to this background that I owe all the good that I have. And I wanted to do something similar for modern kids. Therefore, we decided to organize a summer camp for children with an equestrian section.
This summer we held the first shift:
Teaching kids how to ride
Learned how to care for horses and harness
They were engaged in all kinds of creativity in the fresh air - they sculpted from clay, wove from a vine, and so on.
They also went on hikes. Not far from Ulesye is the Berezinsky Biosphere Reserve and we took our guests there on an excursion.
Everything was very homely: we cooked for the children ourselves, looked after them together, every evening the whole company gathered at the same table.
I hope this story will become systemic, and we will arrange such shifts or sections all the time.
What to do and where to spend outside the city?
I have a very good salary, even for Minsk. And even more so for the farm, where forests stretch for 100 kilometers in any direction. We donβt go to restaurants, we provide 40% of our own food, so the money is mainly spent on construction.
For example, we regularly invest in the purchase of equipment, materials
Since everything is under construction, we have a bank of time - we can get together and help a neighbor all day, and then I will ask him - and he will help me all day. The technique can also be common: we recently met a local priest, he even lent us a tractor.
The same tractor βfrom the fatherβ
We are also engaged in public initiatives all together: when we were building a summer camp, we were equipping the infrastructure for the whole village.
This is how we prepared the premises for the summer camp
Even earlier, a garden was planted together - several hundred trees. When they begin to bear fruit, the harvest will also be common.
Life hack: planted gooseberry bushes around the apple tree. It is noted that hares bypass such landings
For the locals, of course, we are weirdos - but they treat us normally, and we help them earn extra money - extra hands are often required. This summer, for example, they made hay for horses together with them. A lot of villagers responded.
Family life in the village - a real challenge
I want to warn you right away - crises in relationships are very possible. In the city, you went to your offices in the morning and met only in the evening. You can hide from any roughness - go to work, to restaurants, to clubs, to visit. Everyone has their own business. There is no such thing here, you are constantly together, you have to learn to cooperate on a completely different level. It's like a test - if you can't spend time with a person 24/7, then you should probably look for another person.
That's something like
ps There was no free land left in our village, so we gradually began to βcolonizeβ the neighboring one β three families are already developing the land there. And I want new people to come to us. If interested, we have .
Or just come to visit - I will teach you how to ride a horse.
Source: habr.com