The shock about the destiny of our friends is still in the back of our minds…

but in this beautiful (!!!!) place here in the deserts of Almeria, Andalucia, you just cannot be sad all day

sunseed desert technology

It is warm at lovely and I feel a joy about being alive that I didn’t feel that intense for quite a while!

Life can be strange sometimes

This place (Los Molinos de Rio Aguas) is totally amazing !!!

I totally love the people

and the nature is - well, let’s say, very special!

Just to explain in some words what this place is like:

It was an old abandoned village, former agricultural place, where some freaks started to settle -as far as I know- in the 70s.

The most well known project here is Sunseed desert technology, that was founded in the early 90s, since then attracks a lot of volunteers and other guests and basically is a scientific and educational project aiming to find and teach about sustainable solutions for living in deserts.

And there is lots of other people living here in other houses… like for example Timbe who runs an Agave museum with lots of informations about the “Tipas” (Sam wants to learn how to make Tipa drums and Didgeridoos, I already learned how to make strings from it)

The place we are staying at is Canyaviva, the place of Jesus

who wants to build up some kind of community space here.

He is really good in building structures of Caña, some kind of bamboo that is growing here like crazy, that’s where the name of the project comes from.

Our group is very productive in the last days.

We had a nice skillsharing session on the campfire with about 10 people of the sunseed project and the village on the second evening that wew were here and on Sunday set up a workshop plan for the whole week together with some of the volunteers.

We had a tour through Sunseed yesterday and a Geographical Information Systems workshop.

Peter and Paz learn how to make flewts of Caña.

Today we had a tour with Jesus, who showed us some plants that grow around here and what they are used for - 6 of us and a bunch of sunseeders joined in and now we had some delicious wild spinage, saltbush and other crazy plants for dinner.

I was busy most of the day knitting (I learned to do with 5 needles!) and working on the (caña!) compost toilet

- poor Henrik hurt himself while building on it yesterday with an old rusty nail

and as it was hurting a lot and he been sick before he now takes antibiotics

and has to stay in the bus all day sorting photos and bills… (and all this knowing that he’ll go back to cold Sweden in some days!)

Tomorrow we will have a crafts sharing and after that Spanish lessons, the day after hopefully a permaculture exchange.

On the weekend we will use “the yurt” for making a grand juggling/dancing/jamming/Yoga/Mediatation/… fiesta. Me encanta!!!

Then also we wanna repair the Caña bridge and built a dome with this nice material together with Jesus.

Probably we will split up, some people wanna leave on Monday already

But I feel really well in this place and think we can learn a lot here.

So I definetely wanna stay a while!!!

Later more, Internet is closing now

Last 5 posts by anja

• Que pasa? - December 15th, 2009
• project update - July 22nd, 2009
• erste Infoveranstaltung in München / first info event in Munich - June 21st, 2009
• back in the land of rain - June 6th, 2009
• game over ... the last day - May 31st, 2009