If Something is Wrong in the World, Take a Step to Right it.

You know that feeling: you've just spilled water on someones cell phone, broken someones toy or you miscalculated the rocket fuel measurements and ended up blowing up your apartments elevator. There is a gut wrenching queasy feeling and you start to sweat, the apologies begin to bubble forth and you feel like an idiot. In my case I was at the T'Souke Lady Bug Garden, a community project that feeds the entire community with its produce every Tuesday night, fills out meals for wheels orders for the elders and is displayed in contests. While weeding the tomato bed, I stepped on the wooden box and snapped the side off. Uh oh. Just as the apologies started to bubble up, the gardener Wayne surprised me. "No worries," He said, "I'll just cut off another piece of wood and fix it." The apologies died in my throat. Wouldn't it be nice if everything in life was so easily fixed? If everything was made from resources easily accessible in our own environment and therefore completely sustainable?

That is the point of sustainable international development, to go into a community, train the people living there to use materials from their own environment and knowledge to be able to fix things. It is nice to go into a community as a volunteer and build a bridge, but if that bridge washes out a few years later and the community doesn't know how to make a new one or fix the old one, the community is no better off. It is better to go into the community, hire villagers to help build the bridge, train them, show them how to access international aid or send a proposal to their own government for money to build the bridge so that when the bridge washes away, that community will be able to independently build a new one.

I have a project for you, and I mean that in a YES YOU sense *points* Are you up for a challenge?

-Put a sign on a paper towel dispenser in a  public bathroom that reads "these come from trees" and you will save 100lbs of paper a year from that dispenser alone.

-Why not build your own sustainable garden? You only need a small space, a couple hours and you'll contribute to saving the planet. If families of 10 people in Uganda can survive off a small plot of land in front of their house, so can you! The first thing you will need is some soil, which you can make yourself! Isn't that magical? Making your own soil? Star with a small compost bucket in your house and fill it with raw (uncooked) vegetables and peels, throw in egg shells, orange peels, even biodegradable bags! Maybe you'll want to get your neighbours to start saving their compost too and start a community garden? Then take your compost outside and dump it in a container and keep it in there for 6-8 weeks (longer in the winter, shorter in the summer) and let the worms get in. Worms eat 6 times their weight everyday and their waste product is soil! It is not necessary to add the worms in, they'll find the container themselves. Transfer it to a second container and once it stops smelling, you know it is ready to be used as soil, which is the third step. Some people like to use manure in their gardens, just remember not to use fresh manure, you only want manure that is 4-5 months old. Yum yum. You can also add 1 cup of lime, 2 cups of organic matter and new soil to each bed, each year.

You can kill pesky weeds with vinegar, make a fence to keep animals out and change where each plant is placed each year as different plants use up different nutrients in the soil. So if you plant tomatoes in a container, don't plant tomatoes in the same spot for the next 3 years. The best part is sustainability: You can make beds out of planks of wood, line them with plastic so the water doesn't leak out and nail a wooden lining on top, connecting the plastic to the wood.

The thing I'm most excited about? (I mean besides the fact that you are all going to have delicious gardens and be frequently inviting me to dinner ;) I'm a fan of garlic....just saying) is this wooden T structure. You can build yourself one very easily, it is great for creating lines in the soil to plant seeds in and then smoothing over the top layer of soil.

This is a "garden in a bag," which is a different garden than I have described. It is a bit slow to watch, but shows how you can sustain yourself with very little soil. http://vimeo.com/7264277

Maybe you'll get very excited about this Do it Yourself project and start making your own clothes. Now, hold on a moment, I'm not crazy, stay with me here. I'm reading about the many sweat shops used by Guess, Sears, The Bay, Walmart, Liz Claiborne and Disney that employ women aged 9-26 to work 6:50am till 10pm, 6 or 7 days a week with two 30 minute breaks, a maximum of two bathroom breaks each shift that require a key for the locked bathroom door and a propensity to fire anyone that talks about unionization. All for $4 a day. So next time your friend wants to buy a shirt from Walmart, remember that it might cost $20, but the woman who made it was only paid about 8 cents, not enough to cover food, shelter, medicine and clothing for herself and her family. Your own stitches might be clumsy but I would definitely give you a high 5 if you tried to make your own clothing or decided to buy clothes from companies that don't employ sweat shops.

And as always, hello to Moosmas, Janelle, Matt, David, Dad, Donald and the new members Flissdave of this blog!