A beautiful little video with english text about one of our favourite projects in Myanmar. We started working with this underprivileged neighbourhood early on in our work, 2018 I guess it was and our team has been there regularly ever since. (20,000 people, climate refugees from many years back, live in a tarpaulin city with no water, electricity or services)
We teamed up with some of the local women and started out building raised garden beds around their community center (raised, because the entire slum is underwater during monsoon). We collected dry leaves and market waste and worked with them to grow food. During the first years of the coup our team regularly distributed truckloads of rice in family-size sacks (funded by personal donors).
More recently we’ve expanded the garden beds and have also been able to help people start growing food in pots like these, at home. No one has land, soil, or money, so we give them a pot and some seeds and show them how to make the soil with organic waste, what we and everyone there refer to as bokashi. The community women are now helping us to train others, busloads of people as it goes. They are so proud, and doing so well.
The original video went pretty viral in Myanmar a couple of weeks ago (a couple of million views, 20,000 shares or so) and now Radio Free Asia has picked it up and is broadcasting it with English subtitles. It’s fantastic to see the message spreading throughout Asia; it was always our idea but what with covid and the coup most of our plans got scuppered.
This particular one is a lovely project, our team is so proud of it. We’ve learned that nothing happens quickly, but many things work out with perserverence and courage and attention to detail. Having a fundraising queen on the team certainly helps!
Other things our guys are involved in include teaching bokashi in monasteries, at embassy-backed education centers, to schools and sometimes to the general public. All very carefully these days given the political status.
They’re helping create a home for some 80 young nuns, they’re building a bokashi education center in another monastery, and for Earth Day they are planting trees as part of a public event on the rim of one of the landfill communities we work with.
It’s beyond me to say how proud I am of our team, of you Inda and Aye Aye
, that despite some of the worst odds in the world we have been able to keep this project alive. That people who can no longer afford to eat are learning ways to grow food on their own doorstep and create some nourishment for their children.
I am so in awe of what the kindness and compassion of the Myanmar people are able to create together. Hope. And love. And gardens.
About Radio Free Asia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Free_Asia
Bokashi Myanmar 