Myanmar Youth Sustainability Training Centre

Dear friends and family, 

We hope you are all staying and healthy and happy as much as possible during these extremely challenging times! 

As some of you know, Myanmar is currently in the middle of a 2^nd outbreak of Covid, resulting in the entire country currently in lockdown. Our small town of Kalaw is locked down and we cannot leave the city, but have movement to travel around within the town. This allows free movement out to the farm for the time being. 

As we are just coming out of a long rainy season, we are excited and hopefully that the rains will stop within the next month and half and we will be able to begin our building projects on the farm. 

Project of the Month Club
We are so excited to share with you that we were selected as Project of the Month Club for the month of August at GlobalGiving! This was such a great surprise to us! We were featured in ther Project of the Month Club for all of August. As part of the benefit of being selected as one of their feature programs, we are so excited to share that we will receive $10,000 as part of the prize for being selected! 

We are so excited and thankful for this great opportunity. The money will be shared with our other project, Sprouting Seeds Learning Centre. The money for Whispering Earth will be used to run the first natural building workshops on the land to build the first buildings as soon as the rains stop! 

Our first natural building at Whispering Earth and New Land
Our aim was to build the first adobe building in the spring this year, but with mandatory lockdowns and local villages closing their borders, we were unable to get to the farm. The rainy season then quickly stepped in and our focus went to tree planting. 

Now with the rains slowing down, we are making preparations to build our first buildings on the land starting in November, with weather and lockdowns permitting! 

We already have over 3,000 adobe mud bricks made and ready to start. We are currently working on the design for the building and getting materials ready to start the foundation as soon as we have sunny days and get the rock delivery into the farm. 

We aim to build the welcome lodge, with its own unique heating source. We are so excited to start the building project and share our sustainable building techniques with the local communities! 

We are also excited to share that the 5 acres of land that were originally part of our farm have now come up for sale. We are negotiating with the owner of the land hope to make our first deposit at the end of this month! 

The new 5 acres of land connect beautifully to the current farm, allowing a quiet area on the other side of the mountain. This area will be used for the building of our main training hall and quiet retreat spaces. It is ideal with views into the untouched valleys below and only noises from the passing birds and local water buffalo squeaks! 

We are in the process of incorporating the new land into our overall Permaculture design plan. We look forward to sharing more news about this soon!

We have been working the last three weeks to cut all the grass at the farm in preparations for the upcoming dry season. We also are working on new fencing and continuing road work on the entrance road to the training centre to make it easier access in all season. It has been hard work but we are almost finished! 

Rainy Season Planting
As we mentioned in our last report, we received over 600 trees this year. Due to covid and illness within our family, we were not able to plant all of the trees this rainy season. 

However, all the trees that did not get planting are being repotted into larger bags and will be waiting in the nursery for the next rainy season to be put into the ground. 

We look forward to sharing more news over the next coming months!

Hoping you all stay safe and healthy! Warmest wishes for you all!

Whispering Earth Family