Hello dear ones,
As promised this week, I will share with you about the second part of the LAND Training that took place in Sofia. I am writing it with one week delay because I decided to catch the last glimpse of summer and spent the rest of my vacation days in Greece. While in Bulgaria it was full-time autumn, I enjoyed a week of tropical summer.
After the long ride from the seaside to Sofia, and a good night sleep, we continued with the training in the Community Garden 1. Started with a morning circle as usual and continued with the assessment of the garden. It was a very welcoming environment to be there. During the assessment it was decided that in the Bulgarian version of LAND, for this stage of the process to use the term “interview” instead of assessment, because it felt more appropriate and less threatening. Like my coordinator Mihaela said: It really did feel like an interview. The community garden is really on a good track with accomplishing the full list of criteria. It was a beautiful experience hearing about their path in creating this space. We could all see that the members of this Community garden have really put their hearts in this project, and payed attention to every detail in order to implement the permacultural principles and ethics that are also written in the rules if someone wants to join the garden.
They got four out of five badges, for: organization research and skill sharing; LAND network; care for the people; education and demonstration. After that we had a session in which we all discussed how the future of LAND looks like in Bulgaria, what are the future steps and actions we want to take and made a plan for the next two years. In our evening session, our GSV member, Filip, introduced us to his technical work for GSV and PAB. We also had an online meeting with the LAND coordinator of Finland.
On the last day of training, we started with evaluation and wrapping up session. In this session we looked at everyone’s hopes and expectations from the start of the course in Ezeretz as well as evaluating various aspects of the training. After that we had a certificate ceremony for the Community garden 1, in which they received a gift, as well as our trainer Catherine Dolleris, the ethic cards and the permaculture principles cards both from David Holmgren and Bill Mollison, that were created during this project. With this we finished the training. I am now using this opportunity to congratulate them officially on their LAND badges certificates.
This week our association sent one of our members, Varvara to a Permaculture Desing course in Portugal. She will be a part of the LAND advisory team, as an architectural expert.
I also have a new fellow volunteer on this project, Alex. I am sharing his introduction video bellow.
I hope you have a lovely weekend.
Love,
Marija
