EPISODE 23
March 23, 2022
Parisian-born Isabelle is a marine scientist, and a classically trained homeopath. She’s also one of the women I interviewed back in 2018 for my book, Women Who Walk: How 20 Women From 16 Countries Came to Live in Portugal. Since then, she has moved from Portugal to Spain, and now that she’s ‘sort of retired’ she’s been active volunteering abroad, in particular, at Spikenard honeybee Sanctuary in Virginia, in the US, and in Tanzania with the organization Homeopathy For Health In Africa. More recently, she’s been volunteering closer to home in Rota, Spain for an organization that helps victims of human trafficking.
TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:00] Louise: Welcome to Women Who WaIk. I’m Louise Ross, writer and author of Women Who Walk the book, the inspiration for this podcast. And just as I did for the book here, I’ll be interviewing and unpacking the journeys of impressive, intrepid women who’ve made multiple international moves for work, for adventure, for love, for freedom – reminding us that women can do extraordinary things. You can find a transcript, with pictures, to each episode, and my books on my website, LouiseRoss.com.
[00:00:47] Louise: Hello Listeners. Welcome to Episode 23 of Women Who Walk. My guest today is Isabelle Metairon.
[00:00:55] Louise: Parisian-born Isabel is one of the women I interviewed back in 2018 for my book, Women Who Walk, since then, she has moved from Portugal, where she and her husband Oscar lived for several years, to Spain, where they have an apartment.
[00:01:12] Louise: Now that they’re ‘sort of’ retired, they both continue to travel quite a bit: firstly, to see their adult children, one of whom is based in California, and the other in Malta; and secondly, to volunteer abroad.
[00:01:26] Louise: But before Isabelle and I chat about her life since I interviewed her several years ago, I thought I’d give listeners some backstory to her very international life, and read part of her chapter from my book, Women Who Walk.
[00:01:40] Louise: So here we go:
[00:01:43] Louise: During the two years prior to sitting my baccalaureate in France, my parents worked hard to organize for me to live with my grandmother’s American friend, so I could study in California. My father was very conservative and really strict. For instance, he did not like me going out, not even to a movie with a friend! But he totally supported the idea of me getting on a plane at 17, even though I’d never flown before, and traveling to America to live with a woman he’d never met!
[00:02:16] Louise: The Americans had liberated him from a German camp where he was held as a prisoner-of-war during WWII and where he had been involved in intelligence. After the liberation, learning of my father’s part in an underground movement against the Nazis, the Americans wanted him to work with them, but he said no, that he was too ill as a result of his prisoner-of-war experiences. I believe at some level, he always regretted that decision, as the US for him was a bit like the Holy Land.
[00:02:51] Louise: Later in his career as a musician, he got to tour the east coast of the US, playing 20 or so concerts and he had a great time. And so when it looked like I might have a chance to study there, he absolutely wanted me to go.
[00:03:08] Louise: When I arrived in the US my spoken English was not so good. But I could read and write. I listened and watched a lot of TV and this helped my confidence when I finally started to speak in English. My parents had enrolled me in a Catholic high school as a senior. I audited, the classes and at the end of the year, for the second time, I took the baccalaureate exam. But this time at the Lycées Français in Los Angeles.
[00:03:37] Louise: With the baccalaureate from the Lycées, I was accepted into a biology program graduating several years later from university of California, Santa Cruz, with a bachelor’s in Marine biology. My focus was the effect of pollutants on the development of sea urchin larvae. Historically sea urchins have been used in labs as they breed profusely and thus there’s an abundant supply of larvae. And also, due to their sensitivity to contaminants, larvae are great indicators of ocean pollutants.
[00:04:14] Louise: I went back to France to continue my research and while they’re enrolled in a preparatory program for PhD students. At the end of that program, I defended a thesis based on the results of my research. During my undergraduate studies, my research had involved raising the sea urchin larvae in the lab, a highly specialized skill that not many people knew how to do. The professor who’d taught me had gone to Puerto Rico and he contacted me, as he was looking for graduate students to work with him. I was very interested in what he was doing. And so I decided to pursue a doctorate program in Marine Sciences at the University of Puerto Rico. I applied and got a scholarship.
[00:05:01] Louise: While doing my PhD I met Oscar whose family is from El Salvador in central America, though he grew up in California. He was a graduate student doing research for his Master’s. Toward the end of my program, I took a six month sabbatical from my thesis work and traveled to Northern California to give birth to our daughter in Oakland.
[00:05:22] Louise: It took me five years to earn my PhD and the results of my research were counter-intuitive to the prevailing understanding of sea urchins larval development. In the absence of nutrition, the larvae increased the length of their feeding apparatus -the larval arms- to gather more food. When food is abundant, the reverse is true. This led me to develop an equally passionate interest in human nutrition.
[00:05:54] Louise: I applied for post-doctoral work and ultimately pursued a project on Lee Stocking Island in The Bahamas with a private marine science lab to study the larval phase of the queen conch lifecycle. The findings were for use in fisheries management. I submitted my proposal. It was accepted and I went with our daughter. Oscar had been accepted into the US Navy’s Officer’s Candidate School in Newport Rhode Island.
[00:06:23] Louise: My position lasted a year. It was really challenging, as I was single-parenting our baby, while doing my lab research. I ended up with fibromyalgia that included body pains, fatigue, and muscle weakness. In order to recuperate, I went to Rhode Island to be with Oscar. While there we married, but my health was still poor.
[00:06:47] Louise: Oscar headed off on a Navy ship to Florida. And I went to Florida too, and stayed when he was then sent to Virginia Beach to do more training. So I could get, well, my husband took our daughter with him. She went into daycare and after work, he had the opportunity to learn what it’s like to single parent.
[00:07:10] Louise: We based ourselves in Jacksonville with Oscar coming and going on various deployments. My health improved. My daughter went into Montessori school and I found a part-time job with a broker for various health food companies. Three years later, we moved to Rota on the Bay of Cadiz, Spain for Oscar’s next duty station. Our son was born two months before we moved.
[00:07:36] Louise: While in Rota, I enrolled at a school in Seville to study Naturopathy with a specialization in Classical Homeopathy. I studied in Spanish, which I’d learned in school in France, and I’d also used it while in Puerto Rico. At 35, I was the oldest student at the school. I started practicing as a traditional naturopath in Spain, but that was short-lived as we moved to Monterey, California for my husband’s next duty station.
[00:08:07] Louise: Moving, changing schools, a new language, it was hard for the kids. And then two years later, Oscar got a job in Stuttgart, Germany. We decided the kids and I would live in Strasbourg, where I had grown up and where my family still lived. The move was hardest for my daughter. At 13, she’d made good friends in California and was really beginning to find her way as a teenager. When we moved to Strasbourg, she was not at all well received by the French teens. We were there four years. During the second two years, Oscar was deployed on an aircraft carrier out of Jacksonville, Florida. He was going to be at sea for most of those two years. I opted to stay in France with the kids so they could stay in the same school for a total of four years without another move to another culture and another language. It worked out well as my mother was ill and needed me. And so too, did the kids.
[00:09:09] Louise: When the four years were up, we moved back to Florida and my daughter entered her senior year of high school. After moving in August to the Mayport Navy base in Florida, I joined a collaborative wellness practice with other natural health practitioners consulting on a pro bono basis and offering workshops on nutrition and natural health. Just as my work was really taking off, I got a call from Oscar. It was October. He said, “My next duty is in Chile, starting in December.” That was too soon to uproot the kids again. So Oscar went ahead and the kids finished their school year in Florida, and then we moved to Chile to join him.
[00:09:50] Louise: Our daughter graduated from high school and successfully applied to university in Chile. Our son wanted to go back to school in Strasbourg, France. So I organized for him to stay with a host family where he lived for a year. Oscar’s job in Chile was only for two years, after which he was sent to Miami. While he was in Miami, I was in Jacksonville and my son came back from France to live with me and go to school. Luckily, I was able to join the same group of natural health practitioners I had started with a few years back. My son graduated secondary school and we moved back to Chile where Oscar had been stationed for a second tour of duty. Meanwhile, our daughter had moved to Los Angeles from Argentina, where she had been studying.
[00:10:38] Louise: After that second posting to Chile, my husband was offered a job with the US Embassy in Portugal. We lived from 2013 to August, 2016 in Chiado, the neighborhood right in the center of Lisbon. And then Oscar retired though, that did not slow him or us down.
[00:10:59] Louise: These days, we move between several European cities where we spend months, or perhaps just weeks. We come and go from Spain where we have an apartment. I also attend by-annual classical homeopathy seminars in Belgium. When in Lisbon, Oscar has a part-time job, which he loves, transporting tourists around the city in a tuk-tuk.
[00:11:23] Louise: We also go out to California to see my husband’s family and our daughter who is still based in Los Angeles. Our son recently finished his graduate degree at the University of Malta and we visit there frequently. We’ve been on the move all our married life and I can’t imagine settling in one place long-term. I’ve learned how to be very adaptable and wherever I am, I choose to be there completely. I immerse myself, and I’m very present to my life in that place for whatever amount of time I’m there.
[00:11:59] Louise: And now, onto my conversation with Isabelle.
[00:12:16] Louise: Welcome Isabelle! Listeners have just heard me read an excerpt from your story, which I wrote back in 2018 and so they’re aware that you’ve lived in many countries, but now you have a home base with your husband, Oscar in Southern Spain. Can you give us a visual sense of where you are?
[00:12:35] Isabelle: Yes, of course. Right now I am in Rota, Spain, which is a little town at the entrance of the Bay of Cadiz, it’s on the north side of it. My apartment is right on the corner of the bay. So I have a beach on the bayside and the ocean side. And from my, Ático, they call it here in Spain, which is the top floor of the building, I look at Cadiz, which is on the south side of the bay, so I can look at this beautiful little city, which originated from the Phoenician time. It’s very old.
[00:13:11] Louise: It is, isn’t it. It’s an ancient city with a walled inner city. Yeah.
[00:13:16] Isabelle: Absolutely. And here too, where we have the apartment is, is one of the oldest part of Rota. It’s called El Molino because they used to have the mills for the wheat, I suppose. It’s one of the highest point in Rota, which of course is not that much because we’re right by the sea.
[00:13:36] Louise: Thanks for setting the scene for us. So now you come and go though from that apartment, uh, traveling to see your kids and since 2018, you and Oscar have been volunteering during the Northern summers on a bee sanctuary in Virginia in the US. Can you tell us about this and what it is that you do there?
[00:13:55] Isabelle: Okay. The sanctuary is a honeybee sanctuary and it’s located in the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia in the United States. It’s near the town of Floyd, which is a very small town, very rural area. The honeybee sanctuary has many acres. Over 20 acres now of land, where they tend to many bees, so they have many hives. And in the summer, they open the sanctuary for seminars. One of their main project is to teach people to take care of bees in a more natural way, so it’s about teaching how to have a relationship that is going to be good for the bees and good for the beekeeper. The other thing they’re teaching uh, how to take care of the land using biodynamic principles, which is from Rudolph Steiner, uh, how to take care of the land and the plants and the animals really. It’s quite involved. People come two times a year over two years. They are taught how to take care of the land and take care of the bees in a way that’s not exploiting the bees.
[00:15:09] Isabelle: Because the bees, when they are well taken care of by the beekeepers, they actually will give the beekeeper the honey that they have extra. In the sanctuary, for example, they do not take the honey from the bees before the winter, because that’s what the bees need to get through the winter. It’s only in the spring, when we see activity and new honey is being produced and then whatever’s leftover is a gift to the beekeeper from the bees.
[00:15:39] Isabelle: So what I do is I provide food for the people that come to learn about bees. And the thing about this is that there is a, uh, beautiful vegetable garden that is being tended by the farm manager. And so before each seminar that is planned, I find out what’s available from the garden and do a farm-to-table. Can’t be much closer than that because usually the vegetables are harvested either the same day or the day before. And then I prepare, it could be between 10-to-30 people and it can be for a couple of days, it can be for a week. We provide the lunch and two snacks. So it’s quite an endeavour, but I love doing it.
[00:16:26] Louise: Do people come to the sanctuary from all over the world and then do they stay there or do they stay somewhere else?
[00:16:34] Isabelle: It depends. We’ve had people coming from outside the States, like Costa Rica. Australia, actually. They can either camp, because we have a campground and they’re provided with shower and bathrooms. They of course have the meals, one meal and two snack a day, and they have to figure out their dinner, but otherwise they can stay camping or they can be in town where there’s a couple of really nice hotels and of course Airbnb around. So yeah.
[00:17:01] Louise: And then what about, what about Oscar? What does he do there?
[00:17:05] Isabelle: He’s the wood-shop guy. Taking care of all kinds of repairs in terms of any kind of wood structure around the bee sanctuary. Could be a platform where we have many hives that needed to be fixed. He also does build hives. One of his last one was a hive that was made up of a trunk, a tree trunk. And that was a new version of a hive. Another thing that the sanctuary does is use different kinds of hives in terms of structure to see which one are going to be best suited to the bees and the beekeeper. They’re are a little bit experimental I would say to see what’s going to to work. So far I think they have many different kinds of hives. The tree-trunk hive, which is a piece of, uh, trunk from a tree, gets hollowed out specifically, and that’s very hard work. Oscar actually went to Germany to learn how to do that. Apparently it’s something that used to be done.
Tree Trunk Hive, built by Isabelle’s husband, Oscar
[00:18:03] Louise: So then this is learning traditional techniques. The type of farming that is done, that is in kind of co-creation with, with the bees. These are all old traditional techniques, I guess.
[00:18:17] Isabelle: Absolutely, absolutely. It reminds me a lot of the Almanac that, that agriculture used to follow in terms of the moon and when it’s good to plant or when is it good to cut. Those are all things the farmers used to know and some still do, but with modern agriculture, it just kind of disappeared.
[00:18:37] Isabelle: I was visiting the area and I heard about the sanctuary and they have open day so I went. And Oscar was always interested with bees. So both he and I, and our son, went to the honeybee sanctuary for one week introduction to biodynamic principles with beekeeping.
[00:18:57] Louise: So you started out there as guests to find out what its all about. I see. And then you went back to volunteer.
[00:19:04] Isabelle: I thought, wow. Okay. The idea is to, to promote Biodynamic principles for beekeeping, which is good for the bees. It’s good for the environment. It’s good for us. Good for the earth. So this is super important to support that effort because bees are really an important part of our environment.
[00:19:24] Louise: They are, and they have been struggling for many years and it’s unclear why they have been struggling. Has there been any information coming out of the sanctuary as to why?
[00:19:36] Isabelle: It’s actually very simple. It’s like us, when our immune system is not working properly, we get sick. So basically when the honey is being taken away from the bees and to survive to the winter, they are being giving sugar water, for example. The hives is like, uh, I guess super organism, all the bees make up this organism, there’s about 30,000 bees on average, more in the summer and less in the winter. If you do something that’s going to lower how the bees are going to be able to function as an organism, for example, they use propolis, which is a natural antibiotic um, and the sugar water is going to completely diminish their life. And they’re not going to be healthy. So they’re not going to be able to deal with mites. You know, it’s, it’s really, I mean, the sanctuary hasn’t had the collapse, because it’s a whole different way of dealing with um, the bees.
[00:20:35] Louise: Are there any other sanctuaries like this around the US or is this one of the few?
[00:20:40] Isabelle: I don’t believe there is, but I remember the beekeeper that came from Costa Rica is, is establishing one in Costa Rica and it could be some that I don’t know about.
[00:20:50] Louise: So now, last year, in the midst of the pandemic, you went to Tanzania for three months, volunteering with a homeopathic clinic. And we actually planned to do this interview while you were there but your wifi connection wasn’t good enough and so we thought we’d wait till you were back there this year, but it looks like you won’t be going back till next year. That aside, tell us about this project, the group that you were volunteering with and what your volunteer work involved in Tanzania.
[00:21:19] Isabelle: I decided to volunteer for this foundation called Homeopathy For Health in Africa. They are based in Moshi, Tanzania, which is at the low planes of the Kilimanjaro. And I went there June, July, August, winter over there. That foundation started 12 years ago and the founder, Camilla and Jeremy are both ah, classical homeopath, wanted to see if they could help with the Aids epidemic in Africa, especially in Tanzania.
Isabelle in a tuk-tuk on her way to the Moshi Clinic for a day of volunteering
[00:21:56] Isabelle: In those 12 years they developed work with hospitals, where they have homeopathy clinic at the hospitals on a regular basis. And then they also established many, what they call outreach clinics, meaning that we go from the main clinic in town, in Moshi, but then when they have volunteers like I was, then we get into a car with all the homeopathic remedies, our computers, some hot tea, because we end up going to very cold areas in the mountains. We end up in different area around which could be a half an hour drive, it could be more. We are there half a day, and we see all the patients that come to the clinic, sometime 20-some patients, and sometime it’s more.
Isabelle and one her homeopath colleagues during clinic hours
[00:22:44] Isabelle: And we also go to the Maasai land which is further out, that’s like a three hour, so we spend a night in a place nearby and we spend two days. In those area, there’s no medical attention whatsoever. The Maasai, they’re mostly nomadic. Some actually stay in one place and the community organizer will let the Maasai know that we are coming. We speak English, then the Tanzanian speak Swahili and then the Maasai speak Maasai. We end up with two translators and then by some kind of miracles, we actually figure it out.
Isabelle en route to the Maasai Village Clinic
[00:23:24] Louise: What occurs to me is that the Maasai are still living somewhat of a traditional lifestyle. So are they receptive to homeopathy? I mean, they wouldn’t even have a sense of what that is or am I wrong?
[00:23:40] Isabelle: Nope. But they know if it’s going to be working for them or not, they come and they have a cough and then we give them the remedy. They take it for about a month until the next time we come, cause the clinics are about every six weeks and then they’re better. That’s all they need to know!
[00:23:55] Louise: Okay, I see. Do you get feedback from local Africans or perhaps Europeans in the area that homeopathy interferes with the traditional or natural remedies that the Maasai use to heal themselves?
[00:24:13] Isabelle: No. I haven’t heard anything like that. Homeopathy would be very hard to interfere with anything because it doesn’t go against anything that the person might take because it’s not the way it operates.
[00:24:26] Louise: Yeah.
[00:24:26] Isabelle: Homeopathy actually works well, even when people were taking some very strong medication for anti-viral purposes. And the results are just pretty amazing. People that were not able to work, that were bedridden, we actually go see people in their house too, so we have home visits, so I was able to experience all that and it was really a different world.
[00:24:52] Isabelle: But there’s really a nice cooperation with, uh, the hospital. We went to one hospital, which is, I think, a private hospital there and, uh, they were so happy to have us open the clinic. When they don’t have enough volunteers with the foundation, they’re not able to provide the personnel for the clinics. That’s the thing. I was kind of on my own most of the time, because usually they have at least two or three volunteers at one time all through the year. Um, but that wasn’t the case. So we had a lot of work. I remember the first week I was like, wow, this is quite a bit of work, but it was very rewarding for sure.
[00:25:34] Louise: Rewarding to the extent that you do want to go back, you’re hoping you can go back next year.
[00:25:40] Isabelle: Oh absolutely.
[00:25:41] Louise: Good on you Isabelle. It’s wonderful work that you do. And then I understand that you’ve been continuing to do wonderful work in Rota that you have been working with victims of human trafficking. Is that right?
[00:25:55] Isabelle: Well, I’m going to be starting with that association and, yeah, unfortunately, Cadiz being a port, very close to Africa. And not only that, apparently survivors of human trafficking that are coming from the Eastern European country, which is pretty horrible. So yeah, I’m going to be starting to work with them. And the great thing about this too, is that, I’m actually cooking also with a local charity here in Rota and I was talking to the person in charge and asking her if there was enough to go around in terms of food donation for the survivors of the human trafficking and she said, absolutely, there’s always enough to share.
[00:26:41] Louise: It doesn’t sound like it’s going to be farm-to-table like it is in Virginia. It’s going to be cooking for people in serious need who just need basic good food.
[00:26:52] Isabelle: Right.
[00:26:53] Louise: Yeah.
[00:26:54] Isabelle: I’m hoping I can actually bring some health attention to them. We’ll we’ll see.
[00:27:00] Louise: Okay. All right. So then, you know, one of the things that was really clear in the introduction, when I read the excerpt from your story is this very peripatetic life that you live and Oscar lives moving about, traveling, working abroad, and your daughter’s in California and your son is in Malta and you visit them regularly. And to Belgium twice a year to see your homeopathic mentor and teacher and then sometimes you come back here to Lisbon for a period. I mean, this is the definition of a very independent and international family, cause I know both the kids travel quite a bit too. How do you make it all work so that you don’t feel fractured and isolated from one another?
[00:27:44] Isabelle: You have such great questions.
[00:27:45] Louise: Good. Good. I’m glad you’re finding them stimulating.
[00:27:50] Isabelle: They are. I mean really. You know, Oscar was in the US Navy, um, when he first started to be deployed, there was no internet in those days. There was maybe one phone call in four months when they would get into the port, otherwise we had letters. So when the internet came about, and then now we have all kinds of things that are useful, you know, WhatsApp.
[00:28:15] Louise: Which we’re using right now! It’s a fantastic platform to keep in touch.
[00:28:21] Isabelle: Exactly. As a family, when we not in the same geographic place, we are in touch with each other very regularly, sometime even daily. It could only be, could only be saying hello. We have a little group, just the four of us and we send things or we say, hello.
[00:28:38] Louise: So can I just clarify that, Isabelle, so you have a family WhatsApp group, the four of you are on, uh, oh, I see what a great idea.
[00:28:48] Isabelle: Oh, yeah. So we always in touch. When Oscar and I are not in the same place, we are in touch daily, sometime mundane thing, but just to just say hello and good night, kind of a thing. And then we have family chats so that we actually plan to the four of us talk, usually on a weekly basis. We take usually an hour-to-two hours basically, so we all talking together. Sometime, you know, one person talks more than the other, because they have something to share specifically.
[00:29:19] Isabelle: In Tanzania it was mainly audio, which was easier than video. Uh, sometime our daughters wants to see us, depends on what’s going on. When it’s one of our birthday, it’s kind of fun. I mean, they come up with this whole thing about, okay, we’ll get a call and Zoom and say, Happy Birthday. You know, it’s like, we’re on the side of the road in the car, that’s where we are. Right. Yeah. And so we make it work.
[00:29:44] Louise: You do, you do. And this is what people were learning during the pandemic. They were learning how to stay connected, but I’m going to guess you’ve been doing this for years to stay connected.
[00:30:03] Isabelle: And we do plan a family vacation. Once a year, we all get together, uh, as much as we can. We actually budget for it on a yearly basis.
[00:30:11] Louise: You would need to given that you’re all in different countries, I mean, you and Oscar are both in Spain, but it would have to be part of the family budget to rendezvous.
[00:30:19] Isabelle: Absolutely. It’s important to us, we want to make sure we can do that.
[00:30:24] Louise: Yeah. Well, this is actually great information because so many of the women I interview have, uh, international lives like you and Oscar, and many of the listeners I think do as well. And, it’s a, it’s a lifestyle that warrants a particular well, a particular budget, and a level of planning to ensure that you do stay connected, that you do meet up, that you do get together so that the family isn’t isolated from one another.
[00:30:55] Louise: So thank you. Thank you for sharing your tips and tricks on how you stay connected. I just also want to thank you for your time today. And of course, this is the point at which I say if listeners would like to find out more about the first of all the bee sanctuary in Virginia or the homeopathic clinic in Tanzania, where can they find that information online, if they’d like to look up and read more about these projects?
[00:31:21] Isabelle: Both have websites and also a Facebook presence. So for example, the honeybee sanctuary is SpikenardFarm.org
[00:31:32] Louise: I’ll put this in the transcript to the episode with a link.
[00:31:35] Isabelle: And they’re also on Facebook and then the homeopathy for health in Africa. It’s the whole thing, HomeopathyForHealthInAfrica.org. It’s also dot org,
[00:31:47] Louise: Okay, great. So I will put that into the transcript with some links and I think I’m going to look both of them up too.
[00:31:55] Isabelle: Yeah. I encourage everybody to take a look it’s, I mean, both organization do amazing work.
[00:32:00] Louise: It sounds like, it really does. So thank you. Thank you for sharing.
[00:32:05] Isabelle: Yeah, okay, you’re welcome, Louise, thank you.
[00:32:08] Louise: Thank you for listening today. And so you don’t miss future episodes with more impressive, intrepid women do subscribe on your favorite podcast provider or on my YouTube channel, Women Who Walk Podcast. And if you enjoyed this episode, please rate and review Women Who Walk on either either Apple or Podchaser, I’ve linked to them both in the transcript of this episode, on my website, LouiseRoss.com.