Return to Maji
In 2018 we worked with 40 permaculture trainees, drawn from refugee and host community members between South Sudan to Northen Uganda. Six years later we returned to see their progress
As part of a team, I led a series of PDC’s delivered in Uganda between 2016-8. I had come on a fact-finding tour of regenerative farming projects in 2014 and wanted to contribute something back. It proved to be opportunity for a wonderful exchange of ideas, thoughts, and practices and to examine these ideas through a range of cultural lenses and geographical contexts. Permaculture travels well it turns out, and especially when presented through the ethics, principles and design tools, it can be related to and understood readily.
The first sortie in 2016 was a leap into the unknown. We pitched up at a conference centre/ wedding venue place in Eastern Uganda and took 15 students though as much of the PDC experience as we could generate in such a context. The group formed tightly around the core ideas, and what we lacked in practical sessions and site visits we compensated for with long evening sessions, and a deep exploration of the African permaculture experience. It was an incredible journey and experience for all of us, hard work, financially risky but we came away with something that we felt should be built on. We had learned something that in turn needed to be explored further.
The 2017 PDC was a different animal altogether. We returned to the same venue with about a dozen of the year 1 participants who all wanted to repeat the experience, but with another 20 odd new faces on top. In the meanwhile, we seemed to have connected beyond the circle generated by the Wales/ Uganda link charity we had originally gone out with, and connected with an audience that was younger, more dynamic, and already informed and super-enthusiastic about permaculture.
We also had added to the team two engineers from Wales, who arrived equipped to build pyrolysis stoves, fix computer problems and bugs and offer practical demonstrations on much more of the content than we had been able to first time around. We came knowing what to expect this time and it was a powerful and successful course, for all concerned. Hugely challenging, of course, but it gave us the opportunity to apply much of the learning from 2016 and we completed with a wonderful practical at the Busoga high school, where as a team we designed and built a forest garden, with rainwater harvesting, banana pits and swales.
This time we had managed to pick up some seed funding from the Wales for Africa fund here in the UK, so we had also come with the intention of planning a third course the following year. The next PDC would be embedded within a school that already had permaculture landscaping and plantings in place for us to work with. Our relationships with the trainees were deepening, and it was also clear that several if not many of the graduates had the potential, drive and ability to become effective permaculture teachers in their own right. The 2018 PDC was to be the platform where much more of the course content, practical sessions and leadership could come from the African members, with the Welsh team in more of a supporting and co-ordinating role. Part of the funding also was directed at passing on and empowering the next generation of teachers and leaders, as all good projects should do. We were able to plan ahead and have some kind of ability to anticipate a strategic next step.
Much of this experience also challenged me to distil my approach to teaching permaculture down into a tighter, memorable, and more communicable form. I tend to teach through long rambling anecdotes and illustrative points, but this does not work well in such a context, where experiences and reference points are different, as well as language complexities from having a poly-lingual group.
12 days of the PDC allows for each day to be themed around one of the 12 principles in sequence. This approach also develops the understanding of permaculture as a step-by-step design process, rather than a medicine chest of techniques and elements to be applied in a general way.
Principle 12 can be seen as midnight on the clock, the start of a new cycle and the logic we followed was that of starting and finishing rhe learning experience with the inevitability of change and therefore need to constantly observe and interact. This approach also challenges new learners and teachers to draw on their own experiences as material, rather than feel like they are following a formula.
It seems vital to me that permaculture design and its ethical philosophy is not simply broken down into its applications and manifestations, the swales, raised beds and food forests. It is the why, the how, the process, the fulfilment of stated function, intention, collaboration and then ultimately learning through the process of implementation and evaluation, this is the creative and never ending process of permaculture design.
In December 2017, as we were preparing for the 2018 PDC a chance encounter occurred, between a participant from the 2017 PDC we had held in Kamuli and the area co-ordinator for Norwegian Refugee Council at a buffet lunch at a conference exploring youth engagement around climate change. A casual conversation revealed a mutual interest in permaculture, and the wonderful co-incidence that both parties had studied their PDC with me. The first in Wales in 2006 at our first housing co-operative, Chickenshack, and other in Uganda recently. Both had experienced directional changes in perspective from those courses and this must have been a wonderful moment of serendipity. The regional co-ordinator for Northen Uganda, so it turned out was considering running a pilot project at Bidibidi and West Maji settlements to test how permaculture impacted on the food and livelihood security of the families within the settlements, and also host community members.
Over 1 million people have entered Northern Uganda from South Sudan in recent years. Further back in time when Northen Uganda was unstable many had made the trek north in search of safety, the border has been porous to people movements over a protracted time.
The Bidibidi area was a small village before becoming a refugee settlement in August 2016. Since then, the Ugandan government and NGOs have worked to create a settlement rather than a camp to host and contain the influx of the growing number of asylum seekers from South Sudan. It has very quickly become the second-largest refugee camp in the world. Formerly a vast, empty, arid patch of land nearby the small Ugandan border town of Yumbe, today it is home to some 270,000 refugees, most of whom have fled the violence and upheaval in South Sudan.
[Wikipedia]
The opening up of these settlement areas offers a chance for people to establish roots, rebuild communities and begin again, establishing mud brick homes, small plots and a slow return to a new kind of normality. Clearly these displaced people are without income, dependent on food aid and very vulnerable, stuck out in a remote and arid area. This is a huge challenge but also it must be seen huge opportunity.
I meet with the Permaculture Association this week to share the outcomes and discuss where we should go next. I hope to build an alliance between our team and network with others similarly with experience and connections in East Africa because I see such a potential for permaculture to transform whole regions. It already is, but it needs nurturing, supporting, cultivating, there are many challenges and restrictions for these very vulnerable and often rurally remote communities. Help, mutual support and investment needs to be focussed on removing some of the barriers to progress and softening some of the obstacles in the way.
Since the training period back in 2018 I have developed a working relationship with Stella Amuge, with a background in sustainable development and project evaluation but new to permaculture. She has since completed her PDC in 2021 and has had the opportunity to do follow up visits, reaching the homes of trainees in often remote areas, engaging n feedback sessions and building general picture and overview of just how communities have embraced and used permaculture since their initial training. The more we have been able to do such follow-up the more we have been staggered quite frankly by the impact it has clearly had. Many problems and blockages exist, but in each case the training has developed and empowered key individuals to take a proactive role and to set about transforming firstly thier own home and compound, and very rapidly their wider community, communities that also readily link together and share support and momentum.
Stella returned to Maji with Akello Vicky, a 2017 PDC graduate, a trained advisor in animal husbandry and also one of the traininers from 2018. She had remained in touch with her trainee group of ten, and this allowed us the opportuity to gain inisght into what has tanspired in the intervening period. Visible impacts on the homesteads of trainees had led to recuitment by other NGO’s and many of the graduates have been active training groups of up to 100 people at a time. The strategic process of using observation to develop systems that catch and store energy, develop yields and laterly whole systems that can generate useful natural materials to extend such systems, eliminate waste and supporting key livelihood objectives has been transforamtion for all concerned.
Each of those 40 original trainees has gone on to train another 1,000 people more. We have no way of actually knowing that for sure, or to understand the quality of the information passed on, or the resulting long-term impacts but, it is huge. Are we passing on a set of techniques, or are we teaching permaculture a design science, releasing its fullest potential? Only time will tell but I am reaching out right now to find partners to take this forward and open up a conversation on the topic of mutual support.
Maji 3 is but one of many refugee settlements in Uganda, and with climate forcing, resource wars and political instability we know many more people will be displaced, heaven forbid it might even be ourselves! The refugee settlements can have a disastrous impact on the surrounding landscape, and natural resources are stripped for building and energy rapidly. Charcoal burners spread deep into the bush creating this valuable but destructive cash crop. What we are realising is that these groups when co-ordinated can build reliable and sustainable income streams making biochar from bamboo and selling it on for carbon credits, and allowing them to use the product to enrich their soils and kickstart localised growing systems.
I have a very strong notion what it will be the refugees that will lead the rest of us into the post-oil world, where most of us are far too invested in the current system to be able to escape its vortex. But once you are thrown out of orbit, you are out, forever most likely, and forced to find new and possibly much better ways forward. Anyone compelled by circumstnace to begin again, must do so in a deeply ecological way to have a chance of sustaining themselves beyond a reliance on the World Food Program. I see the possibilities for this to be done in a way that also sequestrates vast amounts of carbon and develops sustainable incomes from such practices. Permaculture design opens the door to a whole new set of possibilities.
I am grateful to everyone who has participated in this process, and in getting this far, in writing this I hope we can contribute these experiences to a much wider uptake of permaculture design.