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| Global Ecovillage Network Oceania & Asia Inc. |
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EcoYoff, Senegal becomes a GEN Living & Learning CentreMarian Zeitlin reports: GEN has awarded the EcoYoff educational and research program the status of a Living and Learning (L&L) Centre. These centres in Sri Lanka, Brazil and Senegal, as well as several sites in the North, are living experiments in sustainable community that provide hands-on training in developing green technologies and regenerative systems integrated with traditional culture and wisdom. Their goal is to create a learning web of shared resources in an evolving, collaborative system of experience, education and research to develop sustainable systems on the ground around the world. The other two developing country L&L Centres are the Thanamalwila L&L Center of the Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement of Sri Lanka and the Barus L&L Centre of the Brazilian NGO IPEC in partnership with PAL (Permacultura Latina America). Barus is demonstrating permaculture solutions to living in the cerrado region of Brazil, which covers a vast area of the interior. As the L&L mission is the same as that of the EcoYoff action research laboratory in sustainable development, we integrated our October 2001 Sustainable Development course for Kalamazoo college and our internship program in sustainable development and our 2001 environmental seminar series under the L&L umbrella. We are adapting a set of L&L modules prepared by the founders of Gaia Trust, the foundation behind the ecovillages movement. The L&L Centre also will coordinate and participate in training and certifying the members of GEN Senegal, and has established a partnership with NAMIR, a French environmental training initiative under the leadership of Jean-Michel Pochat. A basic idea of this joint proposed program stems from the fact that the living and learning concept cannot be enclosed within single institutions and their grounds or ecovillages L&L is rather an approach to life and learning in every ecological community. In order to express this broader vision, the Francophone L&L initiative (V&A for “Vivre et Apprendre”) proposes the following approach: The L&L centres give courses on-site but also coordinate and accredit living and learning activities taking place in the service area of the center (e.g. other ecovillages in Senegal). Each ecovillage engaging in an activity which corresponds to the L&L concept is invited to present its objectives and plan of activities to the L&L Centre in its area, followed by its outcomes and results. These can be shared within the network via a website. The accreditation and the certification of these extramural learning experiences would be the responsibility of a jury or panel established by the directors of the L&L Program, and validated by the international GEN bureau. Marian Zeitlin, Directrice, ONG CRESP, Sénégal PERMACULTURE ANGELS NEEDED A local funder will provide a year's payment to a local technician plus all the inputs needed to create a permaculture demonstration garden and training site on the grounds of our L&L center at CRESP EcoYoff (about 16x18.5m) and inside the yard plus on the roof (about 2/3 that area). The project should start in May. We expect that members of the 12 ecovillages in the new GEN Senegal network will come for training. We will circulate a scanned image of a drawing for the design. But working from a picture may not take us as far as we need to go. The last permaculture design course given in Yoff was in 1996 and two weeks did not prove long enough for the concepts to take root, particularly among people who haven't benefited from the education and public information that helps us to quickly grasp the concept of creating an ecosystem in miniature. We will be much more professional if a specialist in the network can visit us for even a couple of weeks to work with the local technician and a youth group. This could best happen in June because a strip of cement for parking needs to be torn up first. Ideally the format should be a permaculture design course. The angel who comes would have to be a French speaker, preferably familiar with the dry Sahalian climate and with the local species or similar species. We don't have any funds for to pay for a consultant, but if the person came to Dakar on a cheap charter from Europe, I might be able to cover the ticket personally, and we could meet the person at the airport and host him/her for free very modestly with a local family. Of course any offer of funding for such a trip would be a big help This is an urban site, with only a small amount of farmland adjacent to the airport runway, but lots of people raise urban sheep, chickens, although kitchen gardening is limited by low rainfall. The funder will pay for water for the first year, and if we do a good job we can hope for funds for a biolytic waste water recycling station beside the building. The other waste water recycling project in Yoff at APECSY YoffHabitat also is making rapid progress so the results from our center should be applicable in the new ecovillage site. Marian F. Zeitlin, Ph.D. |