Permaculture Design Course
On the EVS (European Voluntary Serves) project that I am on we had the chance to meet other international volunteers from other EVS projects in our on arrival training in November 2014. This gave us the chance to establish contacts with other organisations across Croatia. One organisation that I was particularly interested to make contact with, was a sustainable permaculture community in a small village called Latinovats. After I visited them during the Christmas break, I was invited to attend a Permaculture Design Course they were running at the end of January. I was very excited because Permaculture is something I have been interested in for a long time so I was keen to learn more. (I am still keen to learn a lot more, but now I know a bit more about what I want to learn).
This was a ten day intensive course that looked at all aspects of Permaculture and I was struck how all-encompassing it is and how it can be applied to almost all areas of life. I also now see Permaculture as a very effective and satisfying form of political activism, because it offers a more co-operative way of life that takes community and human society in to account as well as the needs of the earth. It shows how everything can work together while maintaining a good quality of life for both nature and humanity. The experts leading the course made it very clear that permaculture should be practised publicly to demonstrate to authoritative bodies- such as governments and big corporate companies- that there is a workable alternative. There for you are not just hollering for change but also creating the steps towards it.
The course was tort in many different ways with lots of different elements and activities.
Theory and demonstration
· Practical workshops:
o Gardening
Building
Foraging
Creating our own dessines in small groups and pressenting them
I am now planning to build on this new skills and knowledge I have acquired from this course by applying them to community projects in the town of Petrija, as I feel a lot of the permaculture principles are in-line with the ethos of my host organisation, Uduruga IKS.
