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It turns out that Pablo is just one of a number of young people who live full-time at Planeta de Luz, from Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil and Uruguay. None of them are paid, but they all get free room and board, and on a daily basis they all meet to discuss the teachings of Chamalú. Taína, a young Brazilian woman with frizzy hair and an adorable puppy as a constant companion, tells me that she came to Planeta de Luz for a conference and never left.
The leader and founder himself is rarely around, as he spends much of his time on the road giving lectures and speaking at retreats. He has an inspiring story, which we divined later. As a very small child he was once on the verge of death, but was saved by his grandmother, a Quechua Indian, who used the old native methods to bring him back to life and good health. As the self-crafted legend has it, Chamalú has been possessed with a deep spirituality ever since, and has founded a handful of like- minded communities in Bolivia, Mexico, Colombia and Uruguay.
Over the next few days we’d often run into the Planeta de Luz kids, usually manning a table at the conference, selling books, authored by Chamalú of course. They invited us to a party one night but we never made it out there, as their strict rules against alcohol or any other “unnatural” substances don’t gel with our sometimes hard living ways.
Yet despite never having met the man himself, the lore of Chamalú and his Edenic community in the hills of Bolivia seep into the daily lingua franca of the somewhat skeptical, sarcastic band of characters we were running around with, a gang of journalists and activists. One night after a long day reporting on the comings and goings of the conference, we stayed out way past our bed times and ended up in a funky bar with great house music in downtown Cochabamba. There we ended the night, a band of drunken Argentines, Chileans, a Turkish journalist and myself, dancing to the beat and huddling in an impromptu circle, rapping about Chamalú in Spanish.
“Everything for you, Chamalú” “Without you I’m nothing, Chamalú”
“When I’m feeling blue, Chamalú”
“Chamalú, Chamalú,
I need you in my life, Chamalú”
At the end of a long week, we file our last stories, bid farewells to new friends, and the twenty or so of us who had taken the bus up from Buenos Aires prepare ourselves for another 50+ hour return trip. Our first night we watch hours and hours of episodes of Mad Men on my laptop, which half the bus become addicted to. The following night we stay up late singing songs together, Latin American lefty folk songs and melancholy tangos. Back in Buenos Aires we make plans to reconnect with everybody at a party later that week, and everybody spins off in different directions. My friend Asli and I head back to her place downtown and fall straight to sleep.
The next day there’s an email in my inbox, from Chamalú. What? How did he find me?
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