In Activists to Grassroots, Tony discusses how activists need to start working with grassroots and create a new hybrid radical activist-grassroots persona.
Hello again, it’s Green Warrior master training week in Karamoja, Uganda, and the 33 Green Warriors have battled flood, raiders, broken bridges and hellish roads to get back to Abim for their one week training.
After 2 weeks on the job in the field, they have returned for a weeks training in nursery construction and a debrief on their first field activities.
I’m worried about some of the Green Warriors getting here in time. I only have 6 days and I’m sure some of them aren’t going to get here for the first 3 days. I organize all the materials before the week starts. Poles, bamboo, cement, sand, bricks, tools and composted Kraal manure as well as a truck load of top soil. As predicted, the Green Warriors arrive in drips and drabs. I don’t let it worry me as we begin nursery construction with my 5 person training staff and the Green Warriors join in as they arrive. This is the best way to handle the start of any course in the 3rd world as punctuality is a white mans thing. I always joke with the Ugandans that a Ugandan watch should just have one hand and 2 times, Day and Night…
We work like maniacs during the morning hours because the rains come after lunch. One team is putting up the frame from bush poles another team is splitting bamboo, while the remaining team breaks up the lumpy ground and rakes it flat. Its a full moon and I feel the effect on the Green warriors. If you ever want to finish off a project, the full moon gives the right stimulis for the group to get it done. We grow our crops by moon phases and I use moon phases to grow infrastructure projects!
The nursery is near completion. I’m conducting classroom training on nursery theory. Its pretty standard stuff. Potting mix ratios, when to water, as well as daily, weekly and monthly maintenance. A nursery this size should produce 20,000 tree seedlings of planteable size 3 times a year (that’s trees that grow products or have a use for the community). This size is perfect for schools or community based organizations. If I’ve done it right I will see copy cat nurseries spring up around Uganda.
So far I’ve seen some pretty pathetic excuses for nurseries. This construction is made from 100% locally sourced materials. The shade is created by bamboo splits nailed horizontally onto bush pole beams.
I need seed and the budget is small to make this project happen. I buy 8 beers and 4 cokes. I divide the Green Warriors up into 3 groups. I give each groups 2 sacks and tell them they have 2 hours to go into the village and get useful tree seed. The group that gets the most seed and the most diverse range of seed wins the beer. They all rush off like madmen possessed to win that prize which cost me $11 USD.
A couple of hours later the first group arrives with 2 sacks full of bounty. I draw 3 circles on the concrete floor and each groups unloads their seed into the circle and sorts it out for counting. I see moringa, pomegranite, acacia, lemon, lime, mango, soursop, kei apple, shea nut and many others I’ve never seen before. The three teams between them brought in 38 different types of tree seed and enough seed to plant out 3 nurseries and all for $11. Good strategy. I announce the winner and hand out the beer prize. The team members each get half a beer and a few sips of coke. We spend the rest of the afternoon sorting the seeds and storing it in a huge plastic drum to protect them from vermin.
The nursery job is going well except for the lack of tools. All the tools I’ve obtained from local suppliers are dodgy quality and most of them have broken. This is one of the biggest problems here in Uganda. Money is spent on helping people become self sufficient but the tools only last a few days to a few months. Some examples are machetes, or pangas as they are called here. I buy 5 pangas at the local hardware. Within 4 hours the wooden handles have all come off. I tell the students these are the most expensive machettes in the world. They look puzzled. Yep, Chinese low-quality machetes cost $2 each. Because they are crap and there is no other machete available, the user has to buy a new one each day. Thats over a $1000 a year in pangas! I hold up a Brazillian machete I bought in Kampala. This one costs $10 usd, an unheard of price for a machete here. I tell them this one will last over a year if it used each day. Its heavy duty good quality and holds its sharp edge well. It is much cheaper at the end of the year to buy the $10 machette. They finally get it.
The wheel barrows have no bearings and use only an axle inside a piece of pipe which quickly fills with sand. The barrows squeak and as the axle becomes bound with sand, the barrows become harder to push. The trays are made of light pressed metal, very light metal. The best barrow I could source from Kampala lasted 3 months.
The list goes on. A hand saw costs $3. It cuts about as well as a kids play saw in Australia. I found a $7 saw in Kampala that eats wood for breakfast. The carpenters are amazed. The hammers cost $3 and fly apart on the second day.
When it comes to watering cans, there is two kinds of shit. Plastic shit that lasts a few months and then splits, then there is locally made tin watering cans which leak so badly you dont have to tip the water out, just hold the leaking can over the garden.
It’s so frustrating trying to make any projects work with crap tools. It’s even worse to deliver tools to communities that are of the same quality. I have made sure that most of the tools delivered on this project are of proper quality and design.
I sourced a steel handled shovel for the community tool banks. It’ll last a year no worries. The feedback from the people is the shovels are a big hit. I sourced hoes, hoe/forks, and african axe heads made from high quality steel. They are also a hit. The wheelbarrows are definatley shit.I dont even bother with machettes.
Imagine being a farmer and having to dig your field with nothing but a sharp stick. It happens here. Imagine when you do have tools you have to spend a third of your time fixing those tools. It happens here. A much needed project here is setting up a tool buisness to make local pangas, hoes, forks, etc with light steel handles and good quality heads. A blacksmith could be employed to make a range of local machettes/pangas as well as knives and sickles. Imagine the amount of aid money spent on crappy low grade tools and low grade food. On the books it looks like theyy are helping the farmers and communities, but in reality they just delivered junk. It proves nobody really cares at the higher levels. All this common sense is an alien language to many NGO’s and the UN.
We finish the week with a session in the training hut on the future of Green Warriors in Karamoja. I tell them other people in other countries will soon begin to start up their own Green Warriors. I also tell them in the future, the next thing they’ll need will be a Green Warrior Field Academy to train Karamajong trainers and showcase their working models of sustainable agriculture and appropriate technology. They all agree. They tell me the villagers are picking up the skills. Gardens are happening everywhere. The villagers want more seed, more tools, more Green Warriors. They tell me it’s working!
Its almost time to leave. The cook has baked me a cake with Steve written across the top in icing. I slice it up into 34 pieces and we each get a slice. We have our cake and eat it too! We do one final big African clap. I release the Green Warriors back into the villages and communities that need them to lead the way to self reliance. The Green Warriors are coming. I love these guys! I’ll miss them until next time..
Hello again from the Green Warrior training camp in Uganda’s north. Thirty-three trainees have endured fierce winds, tropical storms, and flooded tents and worked their buts off building gardens and food production systems without one complaint.
The Karamajong are an intelligent people who have been done over by 40 years of aid. If you pick some one up and carry them long enough, eventually their legs wont work. At that point, have you done them any favors? This has been the main theme in this course. The Karamajong are not going to only walk again, they’re going to run!
I divide the class into 3 teams of 11, each with a leader. Two groups have a woman as their leader. I tell them the result I want and where to find the resources. This is LEISA training: Low External Input Sustainable Agriculture. This is where you create gardens out of nothing, well almost nothing.
The girls are organizing the men. I dig one garden with a team of 5 to give them a standard to work from. The dark earth is easy to work. I line up my team and we raise our hoes over our heads and sink them into the soft topsoil. We dig a trench in front of us and drag the soil into a mound. I hop over the mound and turn around, the team copies me. We dig again another trench pulling the soil onto the mound. The mound becomes a raised bed within minutes.
The other teams organize and copy our system. Within 30 minutes the digging is complete. 3 gardens with a fishbone pattern of raised beds stand out of the flat ground. The students are amazed it took so little time. I show them how to flatten the tops of the beds to handle the tropical rain. We plant the seeds and mulch with the left over grass from the thatching of huts next door.
The students are learning all these new concepts and skills. Their eyes are shining. Sometimes I can see it is twisting their minds and I give them time to rest. It takes time to integrate new thinking.
The 5 rings of sustainability are ingrained in their minds now. They have a manual with all the techniques and strategies that work in each ring.
It’s time to redesign their Manyattas, the stick fortified villages. They have to replace the sticks every 3 months, which has a huge impact on the vegetation around their villages. No wonder Karamoja is fast becoming desert. Between cutting the vegetation for sticks, firewood, charcoal making and animal fodder, it’s a wonder anything is left at all!
I ask them why they have a stick fence around the round villages. Security, they say. Ha! I say. What security. I can shoot the whole village with my AK47 from outside without even entering. The sticks are crap I tell them. They look puzzled. Oh yeah, they don’t really stop anything…
What could we make fences out of for our Manyattas that doesn’t cost anything and that is a common resource, I ask. They look at me blankly. The thinking gears are turning slowly. Ching! A light goes on in one guy’s head. Rocks! Yeah, rocks.
You can’t shoot through rocks, you only build it once and you don’t cut the bush down every 3 months! I can see them all visualizing a stone walled Manyatta. I open up my laptop and show them a photo of a 250,000-year-old site in South Africa made of stone. Same pattern as their villages. Round with curved cells inside and even a cattle kraal, all stone. There’s excited talking and pointing. Bingo! We have ignition! They are onto it!
It’s the second last day. We’ve built and planted several gardens. I get the students to now make clay models of the future “Green Manyattas”. I leave them to it , but I tell them I want some basic outcomes in their designs. They all draw big circles with chalk on the concrete. Each group draw similar patterns for the layout of their villages. I’m getting a cultural pattern lesson watching them. Very interesting!
The models are finished. Very impressive. They are very detailed, even having little clay animals. Each group presents their design to the other 2 groups. Some have little model beehives hanging in the trees. Each model has 2 stonewalls circling the village. The outer walls contain orchards and animal fodder. One has a goat dairy. The walls have little slits in them to shoot from if the raiders come. There is a maze system to get the animals in and out to make it difficult for raiders to escape with animals. Water tanks next to the bore pump, roof water runs into a cistern with a filter. Compost toilets and fire proof thatching on the huts. Gardens and food trees everywhere. They really get it! I’m so happy…. Lets hope they can make these models into reality.
It’s the final nights celebration. Each tribal group is going to do some dances and songs about sustainability. Their singing and dancing is so good! With little rehearsal they have me and the other Muzungus transfixed with their entertainment. They sing of reforesting, growing food, bringing back the animals…the list goes on. They even have a guy pretending to be lazing around and a woman with 2 hoes over her shoulder sings about her man should come and help till the field. He sings that she was born a woman and it’s her role to do all the work while he rests! Hmmm…, that one may need a bit of work!
Finally its what I’ve been waiting for, the jump dancing! We get into circle. We shuffle and slap our foot flat on the ground at the same time as clapping to make a backbeat. The men make a kind of grunting noise in time with each clap. 4 people at a time jump into the circle in time with the grunts and claps. It’s my turn and I’m pushed into the middle. Its getting dark and I see all these teeth grinning at me as I launch into my first jump. As I jump, so do the others and we look into each other’s faces as we go up and down.
I jump as high as I can. I don’t want to be a slack whitey doing it badly. They all cheer me on. I feel the friendship and the love they have for each other. The moon is just about full. We jump until my legs turn to rubber. For a night, I’m a Karamajong brother jumping for joy. This is the first batch of Green Warriors. I’m praying with the skills they have now they can jump out of poverty into a sustainable future
I meet Villy the Indian tractor driver. He’s in the cafe placing a lengthy order to a woman who is staring at him blankly. I tell him forget it mate, just ask what she’s got because there is only that. No menu’s here. He smile a big Indian smile and waggles his head. His ears stick out of the side of his head like beer mug handles. I can sense he is a pretty good guy. Villy tells me he is plowing all the poor peoples land for a government project, (there’s an election coming up). He is sad because the people have no seed. I tell him he can have some of the seed I have but the people must save their seed from this crop for the next one. He waggles his head and thanks me.
A week later I see Villy in the cafe. He looks like hell. He is sweating and his usual smile is fading. He tells me he has “bad toilet problems” and his joint aches. I ask him what he has been drinking. Maybe he has dysentery. He tells me he has been drinking 15 bottles of coke a day. What?….Bloody hell, Villy, that crap will kill you, I tell him. No more coke!
Next day I hear Villy is in Hallaleyah Hospital with malaria. I go the hospital which is a brick building looking like a warehouse. In the backroom is a stained mattress with Villy laying on it covered in sweat. He has a drip attached to his arm. I ask him how he is doing. “I’m very much vomiting” he rasps and still tries to waggle his head. “Are you drinking water mate?” I ask him. He shakes his head. You gotta drink or you’ll die, I tell him. I sit with him for a while remembering my first time with malaria. It’s the worst feeling, like being savaged by demons awake or asleep.
Its getting dark. Mosquitoes are biting me. There are other patients laying on beds in the other room. I wonder if the mosquitoes have bitten them first. Villy has no bed net. Time to get Villy outta here. I force him up and disconnect his drip. The nurse comes in and protests. She gives in when she looks into my eyes and takes out the drip connection from his arm. “Gimme your wallet Villey” I tell him. I pay the nurse for the treatment with Villys money and drag him down the road to a hotel and check him in. The soccer’s on and everybody is cheering as I help Villy to his room.
His brother is coming to pick him up tomorrow. Goodnight Villy and don’t even think about a coke for 6 months. He falls asleep while I’m looking at him. Villy’s lucky somebody was watching out for him. Plenty people die here from malaria. Somebody saved me once and it was my turn to return the favour.
I jump into the landcruiser. My bags are packed. Its an 8 hour ride from hell to Kampala. We go a different way there than before so I get to see the country. There are so many NGO’s with offices in every town. We always make jokes about their names like “War Child” and another called “Peace Child.”What happens when they meet? Do they cancel each other out? There’s “Save the Children” and I’d joke who’s going to save the rest of the people? I saw one NGO called “Invisible Children.”
It must be hard to round up those children if they’re invisible. Many of the local NGO’s have the christian cross on their logo. One has the cross, the bible and some cows. It could be cows for Jesus. There’s doctors without borders, engineers without borders and veterinarians without borders.
I may start one up called “Save the Borders!”
The best one I reckon was in Moroto. There we spotted a vehicle with DED on the side. I said to Santos Hey how would you inspire people in the field if your NGO was called DED. Later we nicknamed Matius, the bloke driving the car , “the DED guy.” We had plenty of DED jokes especially when we found out he was doing a peace building project with the K’jong warriors.
Let’s hope he doesn’t live up to his nickname! I’m pretty cynical about all these charities and Non Government Organizations. All that money pumped into this place with little to show after 40 years. Some organizations get some good projects going but mostly its the usual stuff. I call em “stop and flop” projects because they fail as soon as the NGO leaves or finishes the funding. You know your project is good if it continues to grow after you go. That’s a “go and grow project.”
The land-cruiser is flying down the bush roads leaving a dust tail 300 meters long. Finally we find a bitumen highway of sorts. Now we are really moving. 130kph passing all kinds of vehicles going both ways. Best not to look I tell myself. I’m still a bit jumpy after rolling the batmobile. We see baboons on the side of the road. Maybe they’re hitch-hiking. We don’t pick them up.
After a few hours we stop at a honey project run by an NGO. They have a workshop set up to make beehives made from cane and mud. I try the African honey. WOW! Very nice, like a perfumed honey. There is a little sign attached to the trees spouting messages about the environment. Under the sign is a pile of plastic garbage. Where do you put garbage when there is no dumps? Everywhere is the answer.
Back in the vehicle and continue to Kampala. Finally the villages become towns. We pull over at the side of the road behind a bus. All these dudes selling meat skewered on a stick shove them through the open window. I’m not hungry as I watch the driver make a selection. Something slaps against my window. Its a plastic bag full of pale yellow stuff with a wicked smell like…rancid butter! Its butter Santos tells me. Want some? My hygiene alarm is beeping. NO WAY I say.
Soon we are in the capital city of Uganda. So much food for sale on the side of the road. We get stuck in a traffic jam next to “Mother Darling’s comfortable furniture” factory. People with stuff to sell are trying to look through the vehicles tinted window. Some of the sellers are Karamajong women with tribal scars on their faces. Beggars, mostly children and women with babies scratch at the window. The traffic is weaving all over the place like a bunch of drunks. Its the massive potholes in the highway. Your car could seriously disappear in those. I’m visualizing a hot shower and some western food. All is possible in this crazy city.
I have finished up planning the next phase. We will train 50 Green warriors in a 3 week boot camp. We have tents, tarpaulins and a field kitchen. These warriors will have to dig their own toilets, set up their own showers and build several gardens around Abim in the 3 weeks we have them. After that the survivors will go to the field and build gardens in the villages, mainly around the bore pumps.
Every 4 weeks they return for “master classes” like earth oven building or nursery skills. At the end of 6 months whoever is left will be employable by any NGO or community. I even have 2 guys from the prison as staff.
The course is a modified permaculture design certificate course. Some of the participants cant read and write but the course covers that with hands-on skills. Half or more of the students will be women. I’ve already invited a few tough ones I’ve met in my travels. We also have a manual “The Five Rings of Sustainability” which I wrote with 3rd world trainers in mind.
This is my last blog for a few weeks. I’m taking a break and going back to Australia. I’m coming back with some goodies for the next phase. I’m dreaming of those 50 Green Warriors training 500 Green Warriors training 5000 Warriors…..
Young men have organized into teams to guard communities of homeless families. Women care for their own children as well as others now orphaned. Tens of thousands are missing and presumed dead.
The scenes of destruction boggle the mind. The scenes of homeless families, overwhelmingly little children, crush the heart.
But hope remains. Haitians say and pray that God must have a plan. Maybe Haiti will be rebuilt in a way that allows all Haitians to participate and have a chance at a dignified life with a home, a school, and a job.
One young Haitian man said, “One good sign is the solidarity of the world. Muslim doctors, Jewish doctors, Christian doctors all come to help us. We see children in Gaza collecting toys for Haitian children. It looks very bad right now, but this is a big opportunity for the world and Haiti to change and do good together.”
Our Vision: To generate sustainability and abundance on all levels, starting from within.
Our Pledge: Through our programs, we pledge to catalyze the planting of 1,500,000 trees in Haiti by 2014. This is to be done in the form of three key approaches:
a) Family Food Security Gardens promoting fresh, organic nutrition.
b) Community agroforestry on existing sites providing community services e.g. Churches, Hospitals, Schools.
c) Large-scale Agroforestry initiatives – public/private agroforestry inititives based on permaculture principles.
Our Mission and Approach
1. Inspire individuals, cultivate community leaders. Through a program of youth leadership training developed by the International Association for Human Values, we provide practical tools to help young Haitians adults (18-25) manage trauma, anger and stress, rid themselves of hopelessness, and become powerful community organizers and leaders.
2. Train and support sustainable designers. Through training in Permaculture design and support for implementation of Permaculture-based systems, we provide practical tools and resources to support the ecologically, economically, and socially sustainable reforestation of Haiti.
3. Train and support entrepreneurs. We provide training in advanced leadership and entrepreneurship, source capital to support the start-up and expansion of microenterprises, and partner with local microfinance organizations to support young Haitians in developing businesses that offer market-based solutions to the root causes of environmental degradation.
Permaculture pioneer Robyn Francis runs the Djanbung Gardens at Australia’s first eco-development
Certificate IV by Flexible Learning
The new revised Certificate IV in Permaculture is now available through flexible learning.
Flexible Learning combines short course training, mentored distance and self-directed learning and project work to complete the Cert IV in Permaculture. First participants need to complete the foundation training of the standard 72hr Permaculture Design Course (PDC) and Advanced Design Skills/FLOW courses offered in our Summer and Winter School programs. Those who have already completed a PDC simply need to do the Advanced Design Skills/FLOW to get started.
2010 Dates:
Summer School: PDC Jan 10-23 ADS/FLOW Jan 25-28
Winter School: PDC July 3-16, ADS+FLOW 19-22
Robyn Francis has a MySpace website under the name ‘Permaculture Guru’. And she is.
The Nimbin resident has been the editor of the Permaculture International Journal, a founding director of Permaculture International Ltd and a permaculture teacher and designer all over the world.
For those who came in late… permaculture is essentially a system of designing sustainable land management systems that work with the earth’s natural cycles. It takes a holistic approach to the design and development of human settlements, taking into account food production, structures, technologies, energy, natural resources, landscape, animal and plant systems as well as social and economic structures. It literally means “permanent agriculture” and the term was first coined by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in the mid 1970s.
When The Echo visited Robyn at Djanbung Gardens, the permaculture training centre she has been running since 1994, there were signs on the wall with messages like ‘look for low energy solutions – let the ladybirds eat the bugs in your garden’.
The five-and-a-half acre training centre is next door to Jarlanbah, an eco-village with 43 residential lots that Robyn designed in the early 90s.
“I’d been living up here for about five years looking for my perfect patch to set up a permaculture training centre and this fitted the bill perfectly,” she said.
For Robyn, a sustainable lifestyle wasn’t a choice she made later in life, it was something she grew up with.
“My folks were very resourceful people. They grew up during the Depression on dairy farms here on the North Coast… We had a standard quarter-acre backyard (in Inverell) but it was full of vegie gardens and fruit trees and chickens and ducks and a few hives of bees and a milking goat that we used to tether to mow the neighbours’ lawns. Before we got town water we had a 2000-gallon tank we had to survive on. Water was seriously rationed; half a cup for brushing your teeth. So having a high degree of self reliance was something I grew up with and thought was normal,” she said. “When I finished schooling I spent a few years in Sydney and then went travelling, and that was my real education. What I found particularly fascinating was village culture and the different ways people farmed… I lived for three-and-a-half years in Bavaria not far from Munich. The last of the old traditional farmers were still there farming in their old ways with the rotational crops. The only change was that horses had been replaced with tractors. The only thing they were importing onto their farms was the diesel for their tractors. Their animals provided all the nutrients for the crops.”
Video: Murad al Khofash and traditional farmer colleague interviewed at Klimaforum09, Permaculture.TV
The Palestinian farmer who grows his own resistance
Mr al Khofash, dubbed the “Palestinian with a green thumb”, is picking up on a permaculture project that began in Marda in 1993 but was shut down by the Israeli army at the onset of the second intifada in 2000. The Sustainable Development Centre, in Marda, was initiated by Australian permaculturists and involved dozens of villages in the Salfit district. It ran training courses in water management, composting and other aspects of organic, sustainable farming that were attended by thousands of Palestinians, but was a target of nearby settlers who would burn trees and vandalise farm property before the Israeli military closed the centre completely in 2000. Now, locals say, the military use the building to question Palestinians that they have detained in the area.
The farm begun by Mr al Khofash in 2003 utilises all the skills he learnt while working a four-year stint at the centre, and during a remote-study permaculture course. The farm, which is a member of the UK Permaculture Association and the Global Ecovillage Network, is a blooming tract of land, on which everything is sown with careful consideration to the principles of permaculture.
Mr al Khofash is energised with enthusiasm and ideas as he bustles around the robust-looking farm, pointing out patches of aubergine, chilli, potatoes, beans and onions. Demand routinely exceeds supply for his vegetables.
“The methods we use in permaculture are some of the same methods of traditional Palestinian farming,” said Mr al Khofash.
With Marda as the Model: Be the Change for a Global Green Palestine
At Marda, we are calling for social equity, social justice, democracy, freedom, putting expectations on top-down change in politics, rather than down-scaling our expectations on building reality in our communities. Like in most societies, our mental efforts are spent on materialistic fights and crises, making money by poor value trading, and saving money through buying which ruins honest social relationships. Our lives are filled with commerce for profits rather than sharing and cooperation.
For many reasons the masses are not focusing on change and remain trapped in the old mould: reproducing miserable life conditions. Is there any way out? Which is the most effective vehicle of change?
My conclusion is that we should start a new large-scale initiative within the field of gathering energy masses to spend their daily efforts within a new economy. Everyone has or needs a job. Palestinians helped building their own separation wall from Israel, and the nearby Jewish settlements, because they needed jobs. Thousands of Palestinians from rural areas, especially from Jenin spent cold nights in bad conditions in Ramallah constructing Palestinian National Authority leaders’ trade towers, and also over in Israel as cheap workers. Thousands have immigrated out of the region to find jobs.
Livelihood is the main agenda of the majority of people here. It’s not resistance and it’s not politics. The need for money has replaced the human need for each other and for their eco-system. It looks as though there is nothing no better choice, neither for the elite nor for the masses, but a systemic change and the development of new radical alternatives.
The Marda Permaculture Farm (MPF) is a sustainable development NGO in the village of Marda in the West Bank of Palestine. The Farm initiated in 2006, is also recognized as a branch of the Global Village Institute, an international NGO based in Summertown, Tennessee, in the fall of 2008.
The Marda Permaculture Farm is a working farm and a demonstration site for permaculture principles, techniques and strategies.
Permaculture is an ecological design system that draws heavily from indigenous, local wisdom as well as cutting edge science to help individuals and communities maximize local resources toward sustainable production, generation, and recycling of food, water, energy, housing, and other resources.
The Marda Farm was founded by permaculturist Murad Alkhufash, whose family has farmed the region for over ten generations. The project seeks to promote ecological, cultural, and economic resiliency in the region by developing a small scale permaculture site that serves as a model and teaching center for local farmers and international permaculture students. Farm staff will also facilitate permaculture design courses in diverse communities across Palestine.
The Marda Permaculture Farm is supported by a rich network of international and local sustainability visionaries and partners including Geoff Lawton, Director of the Australia Permaculture Institute, Albert Bates, Director of the Global Village Institute in the U.S., Starhawk, Jesse and Tanya Lemieux of Pacific Permaculture in Vancouver, Canada, Julie Firth of Drylands Permaculture Farm in Australia and many others.
We are currently planning a Permaculture Design Course for March of 2010 which will include a 3 day immersion course in Arabic, regional culinary courses, and historic tours of Marda.
Recently Wael Al Saad joined MPF-team. With his visionary concept about Global Green Palestine, he is helping to develop the Marda Farm into a model for an alternative holistic green bottom-up economy
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