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permaculture - Another opportunity for permaculture assistance

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  • From: Sharon Gordon <gordonse@one.net>
  • To: permaculture@franklin.oit.unc.edu
  • Subject: Another opportunity for permaculture assistance
  • Date: Mon, 15 Oct 2001 12:47:54 -0400


There's another place experiencing difficulties that I think could use some
permaculture assistance. The Educating for Justice team went into
an Indonesian village to document and share the labor situation and very poor pay
of workers who make shoes for western companies. I think they did
a fairly good job of showing what life is like for these workers. They also got some
first hand experience of what it's like to live on the $1.25 a day that the
factory workers make by limiting themselves to that much to live on
during their work there. You can see the info at http://www.nikewages.org .

I was in email contact with them while they were there. Once I had learned from
their documentation about some aspects of the situation, I emailed them some
basic information about how the people could improve their food/nutrition situation
with intensive gardening, permaculture techniques, and hay box cookers. At this
point, I began to realize that the EfJ team seemed to have tunnel vision and
only one agenda which was to get their wages increased and to stop the unacceptable
ways they were treating the workers. They seemed to be completely
uninterested
in sharing information with the workers that would improve their situation in the meanwhile
or which would in effect "teach them to fish." They may have felt that doing any of these
other things would dilute the effect they were trying to achieve. In any case, they
insisted that there was "no place to grow anything." I could see from the pictures
there was room to grow stuff, though admittedly not much. But vines up the walls
and over the roofs of the houses could have provided a lot of food and much of the
ground space could have been used to grow food. Even a pepper a day would have
been a help to a person with nothing but rice.

I asked them if they were able to get brown rice cheaper as this would be healthier.
I asked about getting the village together to pool their money for more frugal co-op type
purchases. I also eyed the picture of the garbage dump and asked them about what
was in it as I was interested in trying to figure out how those items might be used as
resources and the land made available for food/fuel. They did not answer any of these questions.

Faced with this lack of interest in other ways of helping, I did not go into rocket stoves,
water cleaning plantings, or composting toilets which look like they could be a big
help based on their journals and pictures. And I didn't even get into the topic of
wondering if people might not be better off back at home in their villages where
they did have access to land for food growing since they seemed to be on a
hamster-like treadmill working long hours to earn barely enough money
to keep themselves alive.

I thought I'd pass along information about this situation in case anyone was in a
position to offer help if the village was interested in making the most of their
situation and increasing their food and nutrition. At the very least it might provide
a challenging permaculture design class exercise. Given that there is not
room
to grow all your food, what can you grow that when added to rice would give
complete nutrition in the least possible space with the maximum
sustainability?

Sharon
gordonse@one.net


  • Another opportunity for permaculture assistance, Sharon Gordon, 10/15/2001

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