
The aid work course was quite inspirational for me. I had never even thought about doing an aid project or even participating in one. But now I see most permaculture projects as aid projects.
In its essence permaculture is only a philosophy of design to create a permanent natural culture, but it is so needed everywhere and our planet is so degraded that most permaculture projects quickly become aid projects, whether it’s helping by teaching or restoring a small area of the earth or feeding desperate people. Of course, some places and people need it more than others, but we are all in the same boat; we all share these problems.
Now I should say that the kind of aid work that Geoff Lawton is teaching us to do isn’t the standard aid project. Most aid focuses on giving temporary relief often with items that the people don’t really need or know how to use. Then there are some that try to help people grow food or dig wells but don’t have any concept of the whole system and so the projects fail. We separate people aid and earth aid but they are one and the same. A lot of aid can disempower people and make them dependent on more aid. Geoff gave the example of when he was in Iraq after the U.S. invasion. He found that aid primarily was bringing in huge amounts of wheat and giving everyone American money. What this did was to completely collapse the local economy by completely saturating the market, dis-empowering the farmers, who primarily grew wheat.

Geoff has a plan of implementation of such aid that is called the PRI master plan, the idea of which is to set a plan of installment in order to make it easier and more financially achievable for people to set up permaculture educational institutions. If you want more information check out the www.permaculturenews.org. There is a little video on the home page about it.
The teacher training course was also very educational. I have always been fairly nervous about making presentations but always managed it. Although I am not completely cured of that fear, I am a whole lot more comfortable in front of large groups. Geoff, who I consider to be a master teacher, taught us many teaching techniques. Some of these are as simple as how to effectively utilize a white board or as complex as moving into a new topic by baiting certain students. One of my favorite techniques he showed us was the use of a dirt pile to demonstrate earthworks. This not only shows students in 3-d what damsand swales will look like but also allows them some playful experimentation. I myself had a lot of fun and could have continued for quite a while.



With most modern farming techniques such issues come back to how we treat the plant, whether we allow it to take it’s natural course or impose artificial constraints on it. The standard bee hive has the brood box on bottom and the honey boxes on top. This is backwards to how they form hives in the wild; they put the honey combs below the brood, which apparently lets the bees easily moderate hive temperature. The warre box mimics this aspect, and although it means less honey for us, it means a stronger hive in the long run. The beekeeping course was offsite on a conventional custard apple (atemoya) farm where we learned how to setup and manage a standard bee hive.

Also Bill Mollison has come to visit. For those who don't know, he is pretty much the originator of permaculture and has written most of the literature on permaculture. He is a great man and he still has great ideas, even though he is about 83 and has suffered a stroke recently. I really want to hear some of his stories. A hui hou, Wynton