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| 11 October/05 First Permaculture Course! |
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Sorry for the long silence. Communications here are difficult at the best of times. My biggest problem is getting a hotspot here for the internet. World Vision's satellite dish has packed it in so we have no phone and the sea has taken out several kilometres of road between here and Banda Aceh. The good news is that the peace deal is working. Our village has been having all kinds of parties with the GAM rebels and they have ditched their guns. The Indonesian military have mostly pulled out of this area and there's a feeling of renewed hope here. There is still a way to go before both sides trust each other but I'm optimistic.
We still have earthquakes, but nothing too severe.
We are currently in the middle of the first permaculture course (Village Development Course) held in Aceh with 22 students. We have a few locals but it's mainly our staff I'm training. We built a beautiful training hall very quickly which will get a coconut leaf roof the course. Four toilets with baths are now operating, so we are looking more like a training centre every day.
We have begun planting out our farm with cassava, banana, papaya, pineapple and sweet potato. Several swales are now visible and the locals are wondering what all these strange shapes are dug all over the landscape. The kitchen has been renovated, no more rats!
On 11 October we finished our first permaculture design certificate course in Lamsujen, Aceh. What a mission! Five days before the training Hasbi, our Acehnese manager, resigned because the stress over the last 10 months had finally got to him. Although I felt very sorry for him, the show had to go on. We had only five days to construct a training centre and a toilet block. I met with the staff and asked them if they were committed to running the training and they were unanimous in agreeing they could manage it.
The rain was beating down but everybody hooked into their various tasks. We had two volunteers from New Zealand arrive just in time, so it was action stations! I decided to limit the students to staff and only a few locals because I still wasn't sure everything would work in time. Five days later we had toilets and a training building - a minor miracle.
The participants included villagers, support staff and Chakra and Sayu from IDEP in Bali. Our house was crowded and the rain gave us a break after the 2nd day. On the 4th day a logger brought a baby gibbon in from the forest which had fallen from a tree they'd cut down. Logging has increased 10-fold since the tsunami because all the NGOs need housing materials. The students went crazy when they saw the cute little baby black gibbon. They wanted to adopt it, take it back or take it home as a pet. In the end after much discussion Philippe, our French volunteer, went back to the forest with the loggers to return it. We paid the loggers $10 for their efforts and agreed to hire them for our next construction project to give them a new set of skills.
On the 8th day we built a large dome-shaped mud oven for wood fired bread and pizzas. This required a lot of filthy mud work as we mixed the clay and rice husks by stomping the mix in a pit. We managed to finish it in two days despite the massive mud fight at the end.
The staff is trained at the first level now and we have the facilities to train more students. From here on this project will be easier. Over Ramadan (the Muslim fasting month) I am taking a break back in Australia while the staff improves the facilities and plants out the farm. Our website is under construction and will be running soon, stay tuned. Cheers Steve
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