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| 30 June/05 Green Aceh Conference and Update |
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Sorry I'm late on this blog, it's been a big week. Last week I had to travel to Banda Aceh to speak on sustainable agriculture at the 3-day Green Aceh Conference. The conference brought together all the innovative green strategies like agriculture, housing design, waste management and appropriate technology. Great idea. I had to train my students in the morning in Lamsujen up until 1100 and then clean up and race the 2 hours to Banda to speak at 2:30. The roads get rougher each day and we lost a wheel bearing 10km from base camp. I didn't think we'd make it for the conference but after limping back to Lhoong a local mechanic fixed it in 20 minutes. Another hard drive to Banda Aceh and we just scraped in. Petra from IDEP in Bali was waiting on the footpath as we drove in and I rushed up the stairs of the university and into the auditorium just as the MC announced me and handed me the microphone.
I only had 10 minutes to explain sustainable agriculture as the conference was running late. I just had time to say that organic agriculture is a world best practice, that it works in Aceh and Acehnese farmers can make more money by practicing sustainable agriculture. The speaker after me was the professor at the local university who teaches organic agriculture. He admitted he has no field activities in his training so his students only learn theory. After the conference it was clear that many of the great ideas won't go far here, as the construction and projects to rebuild have already been organized.
I've heard that the media in Australia is asking where all the housing and infrastructure Australians donated money for is. My response would be that many people refuse to leave the land where their house was destroyed. Sometimes this is because the government hasn't given them any replacement land or they simply want to stay in their community. Many NGOs are supporting these people, so they live in tents with food and water delivered every few days. Nobody in their right mind would fund house construction in most of these places because the coast is still unstable. The sea is very rough and a few camps get flooded each week. The condition of the roads makes travel and development work difficult.
We are in the process ourselves of setting up our project on community land. We have come to the understanding we will have to begin our project with a field school to get the training happening on a larger scale. The lease on the land is only for 5 years. Our solution is to continue to build the training centre but use only low technology local materials. Our training centre will now be called the GreenHand Field School. We will conduct the same training and continue to develop the land. To counter any sudden changes in the future we will also train a mobile team and create field schools with other organizations and network our project with them. This system will give us other venues if necessary.
The conference showed me how much our training is desperately needed in Aceh. I was swamped by requests for training, seed and advice. There are no other organizations with this kind of training available. Aceh needs us, so we are building in more flexibility into this project so we can be of real assistance.
Our recent training here in Lamsujen was a complete success despite the rain. Some of our students already have home gardens up and running. We are applying for several cash-for-work programs for this village from the large NGOs and will use this labour to fence and clear our land ready for a nursery, vegetable market garden and accommodation for future training. I'm off to Australia in 2 weeks for a month break and much of this work will be managed by the team whilst I'm gone. We will be gearing up for a 2-week, live-in Permaculture courses in September. The students of the training we just finished are already showing results with several home gardens on the way and one young woman showing star potential. OK, that's all! Cheers, Steve.
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