Another opportunity for permaculture assistance

[Sharon Gordon <gordonse@one.net>]

There's another place experiencing difficulties that I think could use some
permaculture assistance.   The Educating for Justice team went into
an Indonesian village to document and share the labor situation and very 
poor pay
of workers who make shoes for western companies.   I think they did
a fairly good job of showing what life is like for these workers.  They 
also got some
first hand experience of what it's like to live on the $1.25 a day that the
factory workers make by limiting themselves to that much to live on
during their work there.  You can see the info at http://www.nikewages.org .

I was in email contact with them while they were there.  Once I had learned 
from
their documentation about some aspects of the situation, I emailed them some
basic information about how the people could improve their food/nutrition 
situation
with intensive gardening, permaculture techniques, and hay box cookers.  At 
this
point, I began to realize that the EfJ team seemed to have tunnel vision and
only one agenda which was to get their wages increased and to stop the 
unacceptable
ways they were treating the workers.  They seemed to be completely uninterested
in sharing information with the workers that would improve their situation 
in the meanwhile
or which would in effect "teach them to fish."  They may have felt that 
doing any of these
other things would dilute the effect they were trying to achieve.   In any 
case, they
  insisted that there was "no place to grow anything."  I could see from 
the pictures
  there was room to grow stuff, though admittedly not much.  But vines up 
the walls
  and over the roofs of the houses could have provided a lot of food and 
much of the
  ground space could have been used to grow food.  Even a pepper a day 
would have
  been a help to a person with nothing but rice.

I asked them if they were able to get brown rice cheaper as this would be 
healthier.
I asked about getting the village together to pool their money for more 
frugal co-op type
purchases.  I also eyed the picture of the garbage dump and asked them 
about what
was in it as I was interested in trying to figure out how those items might 
be used as
resources and the land made available for food/fuel.   They did not answer 
any of these questions.

Faced with this lack of interest in other ways of helping, I did not go 
into rocket stoves,
water cleaning plantings, or composting toilets which look like they could 
be a big
help based on their journals and pictures.  And I didn't even get into the 
topic of
wondering if people might not be better off back at home in their villages 
where
they did have access to land for food growing since they seemed to be on a
hamster-like treadmill  working long hours to earn barely enough money
to keep themselves alive.

I thought I'd pass along information about this situation in case anyone 
was in a
position to offer help if the village was interested in making the most of 
their
situation and increasing their food and nutrition.  At the very least it 
might provide
a challenging permaculture design class exercise.  Given that there is not room
to grow all your food, what can you grow that when added to rice would give
complete nutrition in the least possible space with the maximum sustainability?

Sharon
gordonse@one.net