Permaculture Training Part 1

All right, I feel that I am obligated to start this post by talking about PEPFAR (the President's Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief), which was considered one of the more successful policies of the Bush era and which has sent lots of money directly to fighting the spread of HIV/AIDS in Africa. In Kenya, PEPFAR makes sure that everyone has access to ARVs (Anti-RetroViral medicines). In addition, they offer several grants to support various programs to fight AIDS. As I understand it, the annual budget for PEPFAR in Kenya alone is greater than the entire budget for Peace Corps worldwide. This means that in an order to supplement the training budget, certain aspects of my Peace Corps training (including this workshop on permaculture) were funded by PEPFAR on the assumption that part of my role as a volunteer will be mitigating the effects of AIDS in Kenya.

Now, you may be looking at this and thinking "how does permaculture provide AIDS relief?" Actually, this issue was very well-handled. Several of the topics related to starting small gardens around homesteads with a focus on low labor intensity so that people with weakened immune systems could manage the load. Unfortunately, I don't know if this was stipulated explicitly in the grant proposal, but it seemed like the trainers were not allowed to go more than three sentences without using the word PLWHAs (People Living With HIV/AIDS, pronounced peel-woz). It was actually pretty ridiculous.

While the topics were useful for PLWHAs, they were useful for any person who just wants to increase their income. Yet, by beating us over the head with PLWHAs, PLWHAs, PLWHAs a lot of that was lost in the discussion. It got really frustrating over time as we tried to make these issues to help communities in general, and they kept going back to PLWHAs.

Anyway, the training was really cool, and I definitely learned a lot. We were at a place called MOOF (Mount Kenya Organic Farming, don't ask me why it isn't MKOF) in Nanyuki, a little ways north of Nairobi. The weather was much cooler there and we could see Mount Kenya from there (we all started to wonder if that was the mountain in the Paramount logo; the resemblance was striking) and the entire landscape was gorgeous.

We had a very long session on making compost, and I definitely hope to bring that back to site. We also had some very interesting give-and-take discussions with our trainer about organic farming practices. We used our specific sites for case studies and we tried to address some of the extension issues that we have at site. We got to make a pretty cool space-saving garden in an old maize sack. At the end, we used compost to plant a very diverse garden with kales, onions, garlic, basil, rosemary, sweet potatoes and a few other miscellaneous plants. It was somewhat surprising to see how many people in our group didn't actually know anything about planting a garden.

We also had some less enjoyable sessions from a woman who works with the Ministry of Agriculture. Some of those sessions included cooking with aloe (the woman who ran that session talked a lot about how women who drink African aloe get heavier periods). Also, aloe tastes incredibly bitter. She also taught us the food pyramid, which a lot of us criticized pretty intensely as unnecessary, poorly demonstrated and possibly outdated. However, she also led a really cool session on soap making (both detergent and for use on skin). I found myself recalling Fight Club a few times (although they don't explain the importance of sodium silicate to develop a good lather).

It was also really frustrating to see a few of the things they are doing. At one point, we walked past a sprinkler that was spraying in all directions during the hottest part of the day (irrigation practices seems to come up a lot). I called the trainer out on the lack of rainwater harvesting, and he did talk about the importance of that. For all their talk about polyculture (raising many crops in one location, as opposed to the normal plantation practice of monoculture), there were several parts of their compound where they were only raising one crop. I would have liked to work a bit more with trees and see some techniques like layering and grafting, but with only three days (and the incessant need to use the word PLWHAs) you can't cover everything.

Also, we had an intense discussion on labels (such as permaculture) and how ridiculous it is that there are all these trends and fads in development (right now permaculture is huge, while agroforestry is a bit dormant). Yeah, it's pretty ridiculous.

It was a really intense 3 days, but I think we all definitely got a lot out of it. It was also nice to get a bit closer to some Peace Corps staff. I'd love to go back to Nanyuki and work on a couple of things with MOOF at some point.