Rochelle Comeaux
Co-Founder and School Director
Carolina Peredo
Co-Founder and Project Director
Ty Roberts
Board Member
Agustina Buscaglia
Education Consultant
Our story
Our team was brought together over a mutual acknowledgement of the need for a unique schooling option in Bariloche, a passion for holistic education, deep concern for our current global crisis and excitement over the Japanese idea of ikigai – a “reason for being”. Rochelle and Caro first met in November of 2022, while Rochelle’s family was traveling around South America and soon after Caro’s family had returned to Argentina after 12 years abroad in Austin, Texas. What began as weekly “philosophy club” walks quickly evolved into school planning meetings, educator training and logistics research. Agustina’s passion and drive kindled Caro and Rochelle’s excitement, and in the winter of 2024 they took their initial steps to form Quintral Patagonia (a 501(c)(3) in the United States and a fundación in Argentina), scout out the perfect school campus, and prepare to share their vision with the world.
What is Ikigai?
Ikigai is one answer to the question, “what is the meaning of life?”. This ancient Japanese philosophical term combines the word ikiru, which means “to live”, and gai, which means “worth” and the concept refers to something that gives a person a sense of worth or a reason for living. Everyone has at one time or another experienced the feeling of being in the “zone”. When we do something we truly love we are transported to a place free of stress and anxiety and are able to use the full range of our strengths and gifts. The Japanese living in Okinawa would argue that spending the greatest portion of your life doing what you were meant to do is the key to longevity, joy and fulfillment of one’s purpose.
A person’s ikigai lies at the intersection of four categories: what you love, what the world needs, what you can be paid for, and what you are good at. As a child or a young adult, this can be fairly easy to discover. If a young person is given the time, space and resources to pursue their unique passions, their ikigai can be seen in how they choose to spend their time, their greatest resource. As we grow older, and as societal pressures convince most of us that certain life choices are “better” or more valuable than others, most of us set our true passions aside and replace them with something more logical, responsible or socially acceptable. But if our unique ikigai is instead respected and valued, we are free to move into adulthood confident in not only a career path, but a direction for our life. Our goal at Quintral is to respect, value and acknowledge each students’ budding ikigai so that each one might find a path of service that feels most rewarding to them for many decades to come.
Why Quintral?
Quintral is a plant native to Chile and Argentina, which grows on the trunks and branches of trees and bushes. It is an important part of the culture of ancestral peoples and has been collected since prehistoric times for its different traditional and medicinal uses.
The Quintral is a generative hemiparasite, normally found in the Maiten, Espino Azul, Maqui, Chin Chin and Álamo. Its hemiparasitic nature is exemplary of interdependence with other species. Not only that, but for its reproduction, it interacts with at least two species endemic to Patagonia, without which it could not develop: the “monito del monte”, or mountain monkey, that disperse its seeds and the “colibri chico”, or little hummingbird, that pollinates it… its entire life cycle- dispersal and reproduction – depends on the species that cohabit with it. Although the Quintral is not in danger of extinction, the relationship with its pollinator and disperser agent is very fragile and any factor that affects the other species will affect it.
As in life itself, any action – negative or positive – that a human carries out in interaction with his environment, will have direct consequences on the rest of the human beings and more than humans who cohabit this space called Earth. For this reason we chose Quintral as the emblem of our project.
