The unseen Path

Last month on February 23rd bon completed her first official year. In my last post, I told you how this one year was not easy at all for me. One part of that struggle was that I could not visualize where we are going. More than often when I fulfilled a dream, I would be daydreaming about it already long before it happened in reality. That is one component that was missing that kept me distracted with 100 other things.

Luckily, we have recently found a mentor who is bringing a lot of clarity to the process. More importantly, it is giving us the tool that helps us visualize the future. Over the next two years following is what we will do.

Currently, we are working with five families where we are trying to develop gardens that will function as model gardens in the village. These are our learning/experimental grounds to improve our knowledge about growing food. We are focusing on vegetables. We have just planted many varieties of amaranth, okra, pumpkin, bottle gourd, ridge gourd, cucumber, moringa, chili, eggplants, Malabar spinach, and more in our gardens. By the end of the year, we want to make sure each of these families grows at least 2kg of nutritious food every week.  Next year we will be focusing more on fruit trees in these gardens to make them diverse in the real sense and literally create forests in our yards as the name bon suggests.

However, growing food is only a tiny part of the equation of protecting local biodiversity (especially food diversity) around our homes, which drives us to act in the first place. The most important and fun part is community building. Communities that understand the true meaning of a good life which is away from flashy capitalism and based on the principle of communitarian living. For that, we are currently working on the design of a one-year program where we will work with 5-10 neighboring families to create community gardens. A community garden is built in personal and shared spaces where the community comes together to grow all sorts of food. Over this one-year program, we will have a lot of fun activities. Starting from EcoHack to EcoTreasurehunt to Harvesting festival. As part of EcoHack, this little community of ours will be in charge of developing products with local fruits like mango, jamun, ber, wood apple, and more.  When I say we are making products we are not limiting ourselves to making only pickles, jam etc. They can be fermented, smoked, sun-dried anything really as far as our collective imagination can stretch. One of my mentors says, “ For creativity, you don’t need a lot of money but creativity only”. That was such an eye-opening statement that help us to think radically.

EcoHack events will also include how to harvest more solar energy and recharge groundwater so that our garden becomes more productive in the long run. Here again, we let our imagination loose to travel in any direction and see where it leads to. With the eco-treasure hunt, we work on how to increase the consciousness of the community about the beauty of nature that surrounds us. Through a harvest festival, we work on cross-community interactions where people share their harvest, seeds, and more importantly, love for each other. We will also publish  Eco Newsletters to feature our community members and their experiences with the program. These newsletters will be printed and distributed in the village.  We are designing the program in tune with seasonal changes around the year. We are trying to build a culture where the traditional cultural ethos is infused with new perspectives. We want to catalyze our community members by giving them the freedom to express their creative selves which the current social structure doesn’t allow. This is our theory of change to bring biodiversity back near to our homes.

The bottom line is we are trying to change the mindset of the community.  I understand this is a long haul where the chance of success is a bit bleak but not impossible. However, my newfound interest in how to engage the community in meaningful ways so that it becomes exciting for them gives me a reason to get up in the morning and look forward to the day! It makes my every day truly blissful.
Learn more about bonforest at: https://bonforest.org/