By Sylvia Avontuur Factory chimney or Baobab tree? Joshua Konkankoh, an elder from Cameroon, opened the Training Permaculture Teachers with Focus on Refugees (TPT4R) with a ritual to ground the group — imagining that the chimney in the distance was a sacred Baobab tree. I was standing in a circle surrounded by new faces from … Read more
By Rosemary Morrow When the Taliban took control of Kabul in August 2021, a team of young peace volunteers were forced to leave Afghanistan for security reasons. An international group of friends who knew the young peace volunteers, their human rights and agriculture work, mobilized by getting them to safer countries: some have gone to … Read more
By Rosemary Morrow As you read this, Greta Carroll and Sarah Boulle are in Bangladesh contributing to the next phase of P4R training in refugee camps. They are building on the Outcomes document from our PDC training in refugee camps in 2019 across three continents. They are working with Bangladesh Association of Sustainable Development (BASD) … Read more
By Eunice Neves The crisis in Afghanistan continues with many people still fleeing across its borders into countries seeking refuge and to escape to third countries. Permaculture for Refugees (P4R) shared a positive story earlier this year about a small group of Afghans who were able to seek refugee in a host country with the … Read more
There are times when some groups are targeted by other power groups. This is the case of women, who are Shia, of ethnic minorities such as the Hazara in Afghanistan. For us in a relatively safe world, their stories are the stuff of nightmares. In fact, even repeating them is very fearful. Alarmed and frightened … Read more
To test our theory that permaculture will be an effective tool towards working together with refugees towards places of hope and transformation, this year we held a series of six Permaculture Design Certification (PDC) courses for refugees and camp managers in Bangladesh, Turkey, Greece and courses for Internally Displaced Peoples (IDPs) in the Philippines. These … Read more
Our third experience in teaching in refugees camps was run in Turkey, at a camp with women refugees. The course was co-taught by Rosemary Morrow, Francesca Simonetti and Marguerite Kahrl. We were hosted by Imece village. It sits on the eastern slope of a north-south valley where the wind blows 370 days a year and … Read more
In this new article, recently published in the Permaculture Magazine #100, Rosemary Morrows explains about her latest experience teaching in refugee camps, in several parts of the world. As she opens the article: “The Permaculture for Refugees (P4R) project derives from a solid conviction that permaculture provides humane, integrated solutions to the degraded and difficult … Read more