Myanmar Youth Sustainability Training Centre

Greetings friends and family, 

The latest news from Myanmar continues to be challenging and cause more and more conflict and stress here in the country.  As most of you may be aware, we are now entering the 4^th year of the military coup here in Myanmar and along with this, the further collapse of the economic and political situation. Over the last few months, new developments have occurred and with them, fighting has broken out in almost all regions of the country.  Just the other day, the latest news also tells us of the enforcement of the conscription law, forcing all young men and women to serve in the military, those who do not obey will face jail time. Not many options for young people here, and it has brought the conflict into yet another layer.  

With all the turmoil happening all around, its challenging to find hope. However, we continue to do our best despite the challenging situations around us. With our hope that the situation will change soon, we continue to build up our rural training centre slowly. 

We are in the process of making to new sets of toilets to accommodate more youth and adults for training during the dry season. Due to lack infrastructure still at our farm as well as lack of good roads heading out to our training centre, we have focused on providing trainings at the centre during the dry months of the year. We have been able to secure certain areas of the farm where we can grow the grass necessary to make our own thatch roof and happy to support local women from the village in weaving the thatch roof panels for the structures at the training centre. We also have been able to re-install the solar panels on the roof after the replacement of the previous roof!

We are sharing our mud building techniques with some of our participants as we build both of the toilets using natural materials. As the training centre is also a demonstration site for sustainability practices and appropriate technology, one of the toilets will be a composting toilet using vermiculture, the use of earthworms to break down materials. We are very excited about this system modeled off a system used in Portugal where the black water waste from the toilet and the castings of the works will feed into one of our nearby fruit orchards. We have just started creating the tanks, aiming to increase the worm population and building the toilet frames. 

We are also happy to share that we had our first HUGE group of young people for training. Partnering with a local school, we brough over 130 students, parents and teachers for training and activities focused around sustainability and alternative learning. The students ranged from kindergarten all the way up to grade 5! 

The training was a huge success and we will be offering further courses for larger numbers of youth over the next few months of dry season. We are very excited about this new relationship and the kids have had a wonderful time engaging with nature and all the activities we can provide at the farm! 

We ask for your continued support as we move slowly through these challenging times here in Myanmar. We look forward to share further positive news in the upcoming months!