Learning About Natural Building And Permaculture

It appeared that I had arrived in the Ecovillage Training Centre a few days early as it were only myself and Aediren that did a little bit of work here and there. After having completed tasks like securing the chicken coop - a little but very important task as racoons had been coming in and killing the chickens for dinner - more people came for the work exchange week among which some stayed longer as apprentices that would also learn about Permaculture with Albert. Before this all started Albert came up to me and offered me a little hut in which I could stay in if I cleaned it out. It used to be just a garden shed but it could probably be adapted to a comfortable living space I thought as I looked into the messy room and floor which had been crusted thickly with dust and insects. The first things I notice are the hundreds of crickets that covered the entire roof and with sizes varying from about 1/2 to 3 inches. They weren't necessarily the kind of roommates I was looking for. I spend about two days cleaning this space out, finding a couple of brown recluse spiders in the process and having to exterminate a LOT of crickets. Look up 'brown recluse bite' if you want to be grossed out, it'll make you understand why I tried my best to be rather thorough during this cleaning process. I end up creating a lovely space for myself just before the workload started coming in from the permaculture course (in other words from Albert). Luckily I wasn't the only one doing the work. The number of apprentices had increased quite a bit in the first week of my time there. There was Keaton from New Jersey who was a spirit person constantly dancing on some dimensions which were not always on this earth. Then there were Josh and Lindsay with their two adorable children Journey and Jocelyn. The two grew up in the bible belt, Josh in Texas, Lindsay in Indiana. Josh usually described himself as a bible thumping christian that was studying to become a pastor. Well, that was a description of his past-self. He joined the marines at some point and as he described it "I woke up one morning and 'woke up'." Meaning he became conscious of many things that are wrong with this world, society etc. and from that day wanted to change his and his family's lifestyle to become more aware and sustainable. Then there was Nick who had been a teacher in Mexico and when travelling around South America got in contact with Permaculture. From that point onwards he did a lot of research on it until he decided to take part in a PDC (Permaculture Design Course). There was also Ashley, who after the housing bubble popped got more aware of how the current systems were ineffective and then started thinking more about how to be part of the solution instead of being part of the problem, which lead her to do the PDC. And the last person that joined our group was Conor, a young man like me that got in contact with The Farm and the PDC through his family. Together we did a lot of work on the 'Prancing Poet' which would be a large conference building in the future. We used a mix of straw with clay to fill into the walls as insulation and then covered it with a clay, lime and biochar mix. The biochar we made using old bamboo that grew abundantly around the training centre and then implemented a very interesting 'wok'-technique to transform the bamboo into usable biochar. This was all done under a little bit of time pressure as a show called 'The Moonshine Boheme' would be happening in the space which we were building in. At the same time we were doing evening classes with Albert to learn more about Permaculture. Through the weeks we had scheduled cooking/cleaning/chores for each person. Which meant that there was always something to do and that we would spend pretty much every minute of the day with one another. I learnt to love everyone in the group during this intense time and how to endure the most pointless arguments that could last for hours if no one intervened. It was a wonderful time filled with class like learning, practical implementation of the learning and personal growth. In the end I realised that a lot of the things I had learnt had come from the intelligent minds of the other apprentices, I just needed to listen sometimes and then I could pick up the most interesting facts about childbirth, how to pickle eggplant, free energy... this list would be endless and jumbled together of thousands of random topics. Which was one of the great things about this group: through its diversity completely different strands of knowledge were pulled together allowing us to learn from a very broad spectrum of knowledge.