JORGE: It was all very promising to travel to Ecuador in the beginning of 2018 to volunteer in a permaculture/edible forest community, coming all the way from Mexico, and meeting with my partner Sylvie in person for the first time. But as it turned out, and although this Fruit Forest project has a lot of potential, it did not provide the sense of community and shared joyful work amongst the residents and other participants there. It was a welcomed experience for me though, involving very intense physical activities with machete in one hand and preparing our own meals with the other. I feel content of both contributing with my best effort towards the culmination of this project, and also about all the learned lessons and hands-on veganic permaculture new knowledge.
SYLVIE: We both moved to Ecuador in the beginning of 2018 to volunteer in a permaculture/edible forest community. It was exciting quitting my “regular” live in Belgium as a project manager of a large European conservation project to do work exchange together with my partner and making this our new home. This Fruit Forest project looked very promising and it has potential, but we did not find the sense of community and joyful work shared amongst the residents and other participants there. The work exchange was very physical and included weeding, mulching, seeding and taking care of the plant nursery, planting and pruning trees, clearing land with machete for planting purposes, processing humanure, but also some maintenance work on the property as well as house keeping. I enjoyed very much planting and maintaining fruit and companion trees, learning about humanure, exotic fruit trees, local nitrogen fixing and companion plants, harvesting fruit, seeds and some vegetables, roots and herbs as well as the planning involved to grow such a fruit forest. I was also inspired to see that the project was trying to reforest in an area surrounded by cattle farms. However, it was sad to realize that mining and the pollution/contamination that comes with it has reached this part of the jungle and poses a risk to the clean water supply.
1 YEAR ANNIVERSARY IN ECUADOR
We are currently on our 1 year anniversary of living in Ecuador. We have been working on different proyects in the Amazon, Andes and Coast. Right now we are relocating and focused on finding our home and tribe. More about this after the following short but sweet “profile” section below.
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