We entered Costa Rica about two weeks ago and have kept busy with various activities including many seed exchanges, events and visits to various projects. But all that will come in the next post …
This post is to share a little from the month we spent in Nicaragua, where we found really nice people and visited some interesting projects.
Nicaragua is a beautiful country with extensive coastline on both the Pacific and the Caribbean, many lakes and volcanoes. It’s a country that historically faced a strong dictatorship and had to fight a brutal civil war to end the dictatorship through the revolutionary Sandinista movement. Over the years the country has tried to recover, but poverty remains widespread, and Nicaragua today is the second poorest country in the continent, surpassed only by Haiti.
Even with a grave economic situation and violent history, we found Nicaragua’s population really open and friendly, with clear and strong political opinions and self-esteem. This year is an election year, and we saw many young people marching through the streets and holding political events and demonstrations. Lots of energy in the country …
We found this political rally in Nandaime, Nicaragua
During our visit, we visited three sustainability projects. Two on Ometepe Island, an island formed by two volcanoes in the middle of stunning Lake Nicaragua, the largest tropical lake in the world.
Panoramic view of the Island
On Omatepe we visited the Project Inan Itah, a spiritual development center with various permaculture practices and a volunteer program. While visiting for a few days we actively participated in community activities and became great friends in this beautiful project.
Another interesting project is the ecological hostel El Zopilote, which was designed using permaculture principles. The hostel’s natural buildings and organic food production make for a cool food-forest jungle experience, and is a center for backpackers to a have a relaxed and more conscious visit to the island.
During our visit to El Zopilote we had an exciting moment with their bees. On the farm they have a cross between Italian bees (very quiet, friendly) and African bees (aggressive, hardy). That is, the bees are warriors, but not brutal. We were talking to Danielle who takes care of the bees, real close to the boxes, taking pictures and talking… and suddenly we realized that the bees started flying at us! There were so many! And then someone says RUUUUUUUN!! And we run down the ravine, up the hill, around the bend, and away…. It was crazy to have that ringing in the ears, unable to look back and have to keep running! Ryan got bitten twice including once on his lip, and Danielle about 8 times. In the end we learned that we can not abuse the bees patience and we should better respect the space of our dear friends the bees who make such rich food for us, and yet struggle to survive in the jungle.
The bees, calm, as we began to observe…
Here the bees are started to get agitated…
We also participated in a community event in the town of Santa Cruz on Omatepe, where we played music and shared a little about Común Tierra…
The organizers offered some free organic seeds for the local people, and some resources on how to grow organically, natural medicine, etc…
On Nicaragua’s Pacific coast we visited Finca Las Nubes, a place where residents are trying to build a totally self-suffcient ranch and community, using various integrated practices, with the hopes of leaving a legacy for future generations.
For now we say goodbye as we head out to organize our seeds… we will be trading and offering seeds tomorrow in the Feria Verde (organic market) in San Jose, capital city of Costa Rica.
Story and videos by Tracy L. Barnett
Photos by Juan Rojas
LA FLORIDA, El Salvador – “That’s one of the purposes of the Salvadoran state, to make us forget,” Juan Rojas explains to me as we bump down the rugged dirt road that leads to his homestead, just six kilometers from San Salvador, but a world apart.
Rojas is determined to remember, and to help others remember, as well. It is here, and in rural villages elsewhere in the country, that Rojas is quietly working with indigenous peoples to recover the Mayan roots of this country. A country where the name Izalco, for most young people, just means a volcano, a town, or a street in San Salvador; but for the elders, it’s the name of a massacre, and of the native people who were extinguished on that day.
A curious mixture of Salvadoran revolutionary, Australian permaculturist and Mayan spiritualist, I met Juan Rojas on my first visit to El Salvador. He was one of the founders of the Permaculture Institute of El Salvador, a group teaching ecological design and agriculture principles to campesinos throughout the country. Rojas had stepped back from the institute in recent years to pursue other projects. His comments on that visit about restoring indigenous heritage in El Salvador made me curious, and I contacted him upon my return to learn more.
The story of his involvement in the revolution, of the attempts on his life and his escape to Mexico, his eventual move to Australia and his friendship with permaculture founder Bill Mollison, and his return to his country to help rebuild it after the war using the techniques of permaculture are worthy of an eco-adventure novel in themselves. He shares that story in this video.
Now, however, he’s turned the page to a new chapter in his life, and I’m here to learn more about that.
Through his work with the permaculture institute, which spread sustainable agriculture techniques through the farmer-to-farmer movement, he became acquainted with subsistence farmers throughout Mesoamerica, some of whom still practiced the indigenous traditions of their ancestors. It was then that Juan began to realize that the principles of permaculture aren’t so different from the traditional teachings about agriculture.
“That’s one of the first things we learn in permaculture, and Bill Mollison explained this very well: to watch and see where does the air enter your land in different seasons of the year? How does the water enter, and how does it leave? The same for the sun, and for the earth: they are objects of study, of analysis, when you are going to design a piece of land,” he said. “But when we’re living in a zone like Mesoamerica, among the ancestral cultures there’s already been an elaborate thought system developed about these principles, the wind, the water, the earth, the sun.
“Unfortunately, we in El Salvador have lost our cosmology, our understanding of life, and that’s why we’re in such a difficult position, environmentally speaking, in terms of food sovereignty issues, criminal violence, all the things that are making El Salvador famous around the world,” he told me.
Juan shared his thoughts with me about the Mayan cosmovision and climate change, which I recorded in this video:
This has been an exciting year for him, as the slow process of recovering the historical and ancestral memory has begun to yield fruit. Working in indigenous communities in his native Sonsonate and in Morazan, he has been teaching permaculture principles and incorporating the Mayan cosmovision.
Along the way, as they study the Popol Vuh, the Mayan holy book, or discuss certain traditions in planting, the students will stop and get a sudden look of recognition on their faces, Juan said. “Oh! So that’s why my grandfather did that!” they will say. Or, “Oh, yes – I remember hearing about the virgin who gave birth to the twins who were the first humans – that’s like the Virgin Mary!”
At the same time, indigenous visibility has been rising in El Salvador, once thought to be a country devoid of indigenous people since the massacre of 1932 in Izalco that claimed the lives of an estimated 32,000.
In August, a gathering of indigenous peoples in Izalco made a public demand for official recognition and asked that the government be a signatory to Article 169 of the International Labor Organization, an international law guaranteeing the rights of indigenous peoples.
And in October, Salvadoran President Mauricio Funes made a public apology to the country’s indigenous people for the government’s historic role in their repression, and responding to their request to recognize El Salvador as a “multiethnic and multicultural society.”
After my visit with Juan, he sent me the famous words of Chief Seattle, which he asked me to include in closing this article:
“One thing we know, which the white man may one day discover – our God is the same God. You may think now that you own Him as you wish to own our land, but you cannot. He is the God of man, and His compassion is equal for red man and the white. The Earth is precious to Him, and to harm the Earth is to heap contempt on its creator. The whites too shall pass, perhaps sooner than the other tribes.
But in your perishing, you will shine brightly, fired by the strength of the God who brought you to this land and for some special purpose gave you dominion over this land and over the red man. That destiny is a mystery to us, for we do not understand when the buffalo are slaughtered, the wild horses tamed, the secret corners of the forest heavy with scent of many men, and the view of the ripe hills blotted by talking wires. Where is the thicket? Gone. Where is the Eagle? Gone. The end of living and the beginning of survival.”
For more information on the Salvadoran indigenous communities and efforts to recover ancestral memory and heritage, write to Juan Rojas at mesopermacultura@yahoo.es.
SUCHITOTO, El Salvador – A gentle breeze ruffles the thatched roof of the hilltop shelter here at the Permaculture Institute. An electric-blue morpho butterfly flits past, a sharp accent against the muted blue of Volcano Guazapa in the background. An incongruously peaceful backdrop for the violence, massacres, scorched earth and forced evacuation that razed this region less than two decades ago.
That mountain, the hideout for guerilla forces for miles around, was bombed daily and burned repeatedly; the town of Suchitoto itself became a battlefield. Hundred of tons of artillery, white phosphorus and napalm rained down on the once lush jungles of these lands, drying up even the springs where people once retrieved their water.
But the Earth has a way of healing herself, and her inhabitants, and this land and the people who work it are living proof of that reality.
The Permaculture Institute of El Salvador or IPES (pronounced EE-Pace), for its Spanish acronym, has staked its claim on a stony, hilly hectare in this region. In part because of the strong community organizations that formed before the war, Suchitoto has proven fertile ground for a new approach to community development pioneered by peasant farmers, ex-combatants and a British permaculturist with a stubborn streak.
Karen Inwood was a community development specialist looking for a different approach when she met Juan Rojas, a former Salvadoran dissident forced to flee his country at the height of the civil war. Rojas, by a twist of fate, had ended up in Australia, where he met Bill Mollison, founder of an innovative new system of ecological design known as permaculture.
Rojas was excited by the idea of the system as an approach to rebuilding his country after the war, and returned in 1993 after the peace accords were signed to see what he could do. Realizing that permacultural principles have much in common with ancestral agricultural practices, he began in the heavily impacted department of Morazan, which is also where the largest concentration of indigenous Salvadorans still live. He began working with local farmers to learn their traditional practices. Utilizing the farmer-to-farmer method, he began working to disseminate these ideas along with permaculture principles, and later began working with leaders in the departments of La Libertad and his native Sonsonate.
The first Mesoamerican permaculture design course was held in Perquín, Morazan, in 1998 with the participation of campesinos from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador and Guatemala. These first Mesoamerican permaculturists went on to form the base for what later became IPES in El Salvador and IMAP in Guatemala, among others.
In 2000 he made a trip to England to attend an Ecovillage Training Course at the Findhorn Foundation and Karen, whom he met there, was intrigued with his project.
She headed to El Salvador to help him build the Permaculture Institute, and arrived to find a country in desperate need for the lessons in self-sufficiency and sustainability that Juan and others were working to spread.
“I’d always thought of ecovillages as an alternative lifestyle for those with the resources to buy land and move out to the country and do their thing,” she says. “My interest was to use permaculture for social change rather than as a lifestyle choice, and I came to El Salvador to do just that.”
Permaculture, as Inwood explains it, can be applied in everything from agriculture to architecture to community design. Its main application here, at the moment, is in teaching sustainable agriculture and living practices to the subsistence farmers that struggle at the edge of survival throughout the Salvadoran countryside. In practice, it can mean the difference between malnutrition and misery, and a life of good health, dignity and autonomy. And in an era of climate change, when this tiny and densely populated Central American nation has been named among the world’s most vulnerable, food security is on everyone’s lips, and permaculture seems to be taking on a new and bigger life.
After a decade working in the obscurity of this rugged countryside, with a bare minimum of financial support, mostly from individual donors and foundations in England, Inwood is beginning to see the group’s efforts bear fruit. More than 1,000 families have adopted permaculture practices on their land and are growing organic produce for self-consumption and for sale. A team of promotores, or farmers turned permaculture teachers, is using the farmer-to-farmer method, working through the regional ecological networks, spreading permaculture principles throughout the villages.
And this rugged, typically hilly and not particularly fertile parcel has been converted into an educational center and demonstration site for the dissemination of a new approach to rural life here in El Salvador, an approach that promises to lift its practitioners out of poverty and into self-sufficiency, in harmony with each other and with nature.
It’s a rustic and simple site, with structures built mostly from natural materials found on the land, and with a vast diversity of crops worked by a simple yet passionate team of campesinos.
Other projects in the remote department of Morazán, one of the poorest regions of the country and one of the hardest hit by the war, have taken off and are blossoming; municipal governments are lending their support, and several hundred families are now practicing permaculture, with a team of promoters there beginning to branch out even further into the countryside.
Now, after years of trying to meet with and work with other community development organizations in the region and being repeatedly ignored, regional leaders are beginning to seek out the advice and input of IPES.
And most recently, representatives of the new leftist government of Mauricio Funes have expressed interest in applying permaculture principles to a national food security program aimed at strengthening the role of the family farm.
Inwood isn’t sure what has caused the sudden surge of interest, but speculates it has to do with the recent crises brought on by climate change: crops are failing due to intense flooding, followed by drought. A huge part of Central America’s bean crop has failed, and the price of what remains has gone sky-high; the price of the family basket has risen 300 percent in September and October.
Ironically, just at the moment when IPES has begun to break the ice with government agencies, and just as the group’s services are being widely sought, its funding sources have declined precipitously. The drop in the price of the pound has taken a toll, just as the financial crisis has left funders with less to share.
At the same time, the Funes government inherited the traditional patronage system of agricultural assistance, in which $33 million in agricultural “packages” consisting of hybrid seeds and agrochemicals are distributed throughout the country.
In the first year of its administration, before the young government had a chance to organize an alternative, the agricultural packages went out in the traditional way and there was an outcry among those who weren’t on the receiving end. The government realized the old system wasn’t working, and is now looking for new alternatives, Karen said. Permaculture is one of those alternatives.
“We’re excited but at the same time, it’s challenging,” she confesses, her expressive blue eyes widening. Those blue eyes, together with her gentle, sweet manner and her British-accented Spanish, have worked their magic with more than one hard-hearted bureaucrat, I imagined, watching her present her ideas to a pair of authorities from the United Nations Development Fund. The pair left impressed with what they saw, and were scheduled to attend another meeting with IPES the following week.
Contrasting with Karen’s feminine, British touch are the passionate and very Salvadoran approach of Agustin “Maclobio” Duran and Alejandro Martínez, two former Salvadoran guerillas who took the design course and ended up converts to the permaculture cause. Both see permaculture as a means to achieve the same goals they strove for in the revolution: a dignified life for their families.
After the war, an army of nongovernmental organizations descended on El Salvador, each with a different proposal for solving the country’s deeply entrenched problems. Like others from IPES, Agustin is critical of their approach. None that he has seen were ultimately viable, he said, and some were even deceptive; together, they left communities with a dependency mentality and in some ways, worse off than they were before. Permaculture, on the other hand, offers a different model, one that empowers people to take control of their own lives.
“I see it as a different kind of revolution, one that achieves just what we were fighting for – a dignified life for our people, healthy food and an education,” he said.
“From what I’ve seen since the war and in fact in my whole life, permaculture is what convinces me the most; it’s a more integral proposal. Of course it requires a lot of sacrifice, but if we were able to withstand all the risks and hardships of the war, we can do this, too.”
For Alejandro, the shift to this form of agriculture is urgently necessary, not just individually but at the community level.
“If we continue with the same agricultural practices we’ve inherited, we are going to suffer a great famine,” he said. “If we can spread the ideas of permaculture, we can all live well, and have a better system to pass on to the future generations.”
Agustin nodded his agreement. “That’s the challenge we face,” he said. “If we can successfully transmit these ideas, in 20 years things will be very different here, and maybe we can shift a little the destructive direction we’re headed in. We already have the effects of climate change upon us – but from this battle trench of IPES, we can minimize the impact, the consequences that we have already been suffering.
“We as campesinos, people who don’t have economic power, want to show the world that relying on solutions and alternatives so simple as learning from what surrounds us in nature, we can have multiple solutions to great problems, and we can solve them. It’s just a question of education and consciousness.”
For more information about the Permaculture Institute of El Salvador, to pay a visit or to sign on as a volunteer, see their website and/or their Facebook page.
My other Pato contact was Laura Montoya, an elusive sprite of a woman who only sporadically answered e-mail and telephone. Laura had temporarily inherited the leadership of eReciclaje, an urban permaculture group established by her partner, Felipe Rrague, upon his departure to study in the States.
I finally caught up with her at a presentation at a local university, and she was worth the wait.
Laura Montoya of the peacock-feather earring, the disarming smile and the passionate rapid-fire defense of the Pachamama, is a one-woman Earth revolution in action. Over coffee, she sized me up and apparently decided I was worth her time, and she invited me to her home and the new headquarters of eReciclaje in the marginal barrio of Belen, up in the hills on the outskirts of the city.
The trip itself was almost as memorable as the actual visit. Starting from the classic Hotel Nutibara, whose elegant neoclassic lines are meant for others with far greater budgets than mine, I climbed into a bus destined for the outskirts. After nearly half an hour of traffic through the modern world of esthetic salons and shopping malls and residential neighborhoods we began to climb up and up into another world, one in which houses begin with brick and end with sheet metal and black plastic, where women still carry water in jugs and corn in tubs on their heads, where the smoke from cooking fires curls hangs in the air, where you or your neighbor may or may not have electricity or running water.
It was here that eReciclaje located its second project, the first one, an urban permaculture center in the rougher Barrio Triste neighborhood, having been undone by a devastating robbery.
Here, according to Laura, Felipe started over again, building terraces and irrigation ditches and working the land. Here is the regional headquarters for A Limpiar el Mundo or Clean Up The World, an international group working to organize mass cleanup projects, and here the plastic detritus of the neighborhood becomes eco-bricks of the sort David had demonstrated to me earlier.
But first, I had to find it. The neighborhood was a network of streets without names, and a misunderstanding led me to get off the bus in the wrong place. Finally, there she was, smiling, brilliant in her green hindu pants, big white sunglasses and peacock feather. We embraced, long-lost friends who had only met, and she led me up the hill to her “finca” next to the brick factory, where trucks rumbled up and down all day long, carrying away red bits of mountain in their cavernous beds.
Ironic, and someone poetic, that their little eco-brick workshop is right next to a brick factory of quite a different sort.
I thought of what David told me the other night in Sajonia as he tended his little fire. The Center for Ecological Arts is similarly situated in a truck-traffic zone near the cantera (quarry) and trucks rumble past all day long. Here, too, one can look out from this little mountain paradise and see the mountain across the valley being slowly eaten away.
“Some might see this as a negative thing, and sure, it’s sad to see the way they are altering the mountain – I wish they wouldn’t do it,” David had said, thoughtfully. “But this is exactly the mentality we are working to change – so it’s better that we are here, rather than isolating ourselves from it.”
Laura, it turned out, is not so different from me at 25, in love with an activist completely dedicated to his work, taking on the mantel of his cause as her own. Only hers had left the whole operation in her young hands. Suddenly I understood her reluctance to meet with me. She had been simply overwhelmed.
Still, her words flowed crisp and clear like the mountain stream outside the window. She spoke of dreams and visions, of tarot and shamans and sacred medicine, of greening and cleaning the world.
“Everything has a message, if we listen,” she told me.
ALMOLONGA, Guatemala – Ramón Siquina has depended on insecticides, herbicides and chemical fertilizers like everyone else in this green produce basket of the Quetzaltenango province. But nowadays, he’s using fewer of them.
“Fertilizers have helped us a lot, and it was a great advance for us,” he said. “But we’ve been conscious that the state of our soil is deteriorating. We began using lots of fertilizers, fungicides and pesticides, which we wouldn’t have to use if the land was still rich like in the times of our forefathers.”
We’re standing on the roof of his cement-block home, a soft mist descending over the green valleys and hills surrounding us. Almalonga, a community of 20,000 on the outskirts of Xela, is unusual in that the forefathers saved the richest soils in the valley for agriculture, and built the homes around the fields and up into the hills. For years the community has produced the huge truckloads of cabbage, squash, corn, lettuce and radishes that feed the city, but it’s getting harder.
“I’ve struggled and struggled with this piece of land; I put all the chemicals possible on it, and it still didn’t produce,” Ramón was saying. “I realized I had to change the way I was growing.”
That’s when he met the folks from Semilla Nueva (meaning “new seed” in Spanish), a new organization formed by a group of high school and college buddies from the Pacific Northwest. They began to talk about farming practices and Rafael shared his problem. Curt Bowen and Trinidad Recinos, two of the group’s founders, suggested compost as an alternative to chemical fertilizer and offered to help him set up a composting vermiculture project, and that’s how we all ended up tonight on Ramón’s roof, with Ramón and Joseph combing through the garbage to examine the progress of the squirming colonies of worms.
“God gives us a way of showing us what we need,” said Ramón. “It’s a small project now, but one day it will be big.”
****
Oregonian Joseph Bornstein was just 18 when he made his first trip to Nicaragua with a couple of buddies from the Ashland High School Class of 2003 in Oregon. They had decided to take a gap year to travel in Central America before beginning college.
“We’d learned a lot about the world from books and from our desks, but we wanted to learn about it for ourselves.”
The friends made their way down to San Juan del Sur, a fishing village near the border with Costa Rica, where they made a friendship that would change their lives. Their friend was Alix Fermin, a fisherman and a father of a delightful 3-year-old.
“He was such a loving, joy-filled person,” recalls Bornstein wistfully. The friends spent some carefree days with the family, learning about the family’s culture and way of life. Three months later, they learned that Alix had died in a fishing accident – a not uncommon occurrence, given the rudimentary nature of the equipment the poor villagers used in those parts.
“We put our heads together to see if there was a way we could provide a long-term form of support for the family, since their breadwinner was no more,” Bornstein said. The friends decided to pool their resources and build a house that the family could rent out so they would always have income. They raised $8,000 and headed south in 2005 to build the home.
In the interim, much had changed. A spike in the petroleum prices had caused the prices of basic necessities to double. “That woke us up to the need for more structural change,” said Bornstein.
That was when Curt Bowen, a college buddy, got into the picture. By that time, Bowen and Bornstein were studying at Whitman College in Washington State and hit on the idea of building a biofuel network in Central America, teaching local farmers. They laid the groundwork for a series of workshops throughout the Americas and made plans to establish resource centers in each community. The idea was to teach organized communities, community leaders, and non-profits processor fabrication and biofuel production. Two professors from Whitman helped them design an independent study course, and a friend in Antigua offered to loan them a Guatemalan chicken bus for the experiment, and they were set.
They converted the bus for biodiesel, and with 400 gallons of the stuff, made their way from Washington State all the way down to Nicaragua, teaching farmers and community members how to convert waste crop materials to fuel and setting up an infrastructure to keep the project going after they left.
The project was a good one, but as their studies progressed, they realized that it didn’t really address a more fundamental issue.
“For biofuels to be done well, you have to start with organic agriculture,” said Curt. Much of the world’s biofuel production is coming from palm oil forests in Indonesia and Malaysia, he pointed out; 89 percent of rainforest deforestations come from biofuel production. Making matters worse is that after the forests are slashed, the peat bogs underlying them are drained and burned to make more biofuels, and the resultant emissions have made Indonesia the third largest producer of greenhouse gases.
A sad and ironic turn of events for a supposedly green technology.
So the friends began to think of ways they could work with local farmers to promote a more sustainable approach to agriculture, and they recruited more friends from Whitman and from Ashland for their next project: Semilla Nueva. They also contacted Trinidad, a Guatemalan palm oil grower they had met on the biodiesel trip who had embraced their project with such an innovative spirit they recruited him to join their project.
One of the first things they did was visit the Ministry of Agriculture, where they were brought into an office with an impressive desk made of tropical wood. Embedded in the design was a small plaque: “Donated by Dow Chemical Co.” Soon they noticed the plush sofa had been donated by Monsanto.
“It turned out that every piece of furniture in that place had been donated by a chemical company,” laughed Curt.
Guatemalan agriculture has been heavily dominated by the chemical industry and utilizes products that were banned in the states a long time ago, resulting in damaging runoff, pesticide poisoning of unprotected workers, depleted soils and other ills, they explained.
Alternative farming practices had been introduced in the country, but there’s little support and follow-through with these projects, Curt said. In a country of more than a corn million farmers, there are 17 government corn specialists available to offer assistance.
There are a number of NGOs currently working in the country on sustainable agriculture projects, but most are isolated from each other and working on specific projects, Semilla Nueva’s goal, with the help of a Dutch organization called Gota Verde (Green Drop), was to fill in the gaps.
“One of the biggest problems in development is not a lack of technology; it’s getting that technology out to the people who need it,” said Curt. “For example, conservation tillage – a practice that’s very easy to use, but nobody’s using it here because nobody’s promoting it.”
Now they’re working on a variety of projects in the surrounding countryside, and one that they’re most excited about is a joint project with a Spanish NGO called Intervida. They will be training promotores, or community-based educators, who are already working for Intervida to spread the word about (health??). Now they’ll also be able to teach sustainable farming techniques, from composting and contour ditches to living barriers and shuffle hoes.
The pair’s faces light up when they talk about “action research,” a strategy for working together with local farmers to experiment their way toward the best practices for each farm. Just as Ramón is measuring the progress of his two differently managed vermiculture bins, local farmers will be experimenting with techniques that allow them to wean their dependence from chemical inputs.
Now with a new associate, Darren Yondorf, and with two more staff members on the way, the group will be fully staffed within two weeks – just in time to receive the first round of volunteers from Yale, Kentucky University, the University of Puget Sound and of course their alma mater Whitman College. The volunteers will be living out on the farms, working with farmers to help them incorporate the new practices and monitor the results.
But the most ambitious part of their project is perhaps the most important, and also the hardest to measure. By working within local farmer associations and helping to build others, they are hoping to build community leadership through sustainable agriculture practices.
“As the promotores become involved in the research, the impact will grow,” said Curt. “We’re trying to promote sustainable agriculture, but we’re trying to build unity in the community as well.”
On Omatepe we visited the Project Inan Itah, a spiritual development center with various permaculture practices and a volunteer program. While visiting for a few days we actively participated in community activities and became great friends in this beautiful project.
