CIDEP Permaculture Center: working to live in the land of the lakes

For the past three weeks I have been living at a rural farm and permaculture center outside the town of El Bolson, Patagonia, Argentina. (website
Www.permaculturadelsur.org.ar). I have been learning a great deal about building up and maintaining an intentional community that is self-sustaining and geared toward sustainable living. We produce very little trash, and with what ¨waste¨ materials we do have (including bottles, scraps, fertalizer, etc) we have been both excericing our imaginations to find productive ways to use as well as taking advantage of technologies and methods for powering everyday life such as solar heaters and methods of natural building with clay we dig from our own riverbed. We live and sleep in buildings just like the ones we are leaning to construct in that way, in fact. I feel excited to be absorbing knowledge about how to build and craft habitations that are comfortable, pretty, and so definitely rooted in their place and environment. At the same time we are taking on native plant reforestation projects and also leaning to brew our own beer, make pasta...it feels so good to be actually doing the work of living well--experiencing what it takes, and then enjoying the benefits of the entire process as a whole--as opposed to being in the position of a disconnected consumer and nothing more. I think there is so much more personal benefit in that experience than at first might meet the eye. At the same time, I am making friends with splendid people from all over the world, making contacts for later travel, and I have a sense that I have a home for a while--all in all, I am very pleased with my experience here so far. So much so, that from here I plan to contiinue to travel for a bit within the network of such places to which I have been introduced and which stretches all over latin america. To that end, I am currently researching locations in Chile, Bolivia, Brasil...and I am excited about the possibilities that have opened up so far. For now, I will continue on here for maybe one or two weeks more, working during the week and attending festivals, camping, and hiking during the weekends in this beautiful place. After that...I will feel sad to leave...perhaps that as why I want to take my time making my way north...and to be honest, I don´t think I will ever really leave it entirely, no matter where I might go. I am realizing that part of me is here now, whatever that might mean in the future for me and for it. We´re now mixed together somehow, in some sense. I feel enriched by it all, and I can only imagine that this is a mutual experience.






One of the steps for making adobe bricks out of clay, sand, and straw is jumping in yourself and getting your feet wet...not to mention covered in muck!

Beer-making!