The Garden of Peace, a Buddha Smiles project of Ramu Manivannan, a professor of political science at the University of Madras is a living museum of peace. It is a place where all are welcome, children learn from teachers of the village, play is an every day occurrence, beautiful flowers bloom always, trees grow fast and many have some fruit. Over 5000 people have come through the space talking about the peace and sustainability work they are doing or planning. Volunteers from all over the world (myself included) come to plan and work the land using permaculture techniques and continue the traditions of natural building, herbal medicine, and ecological communal living. Garden of Peace is located in a small farming village in Kurumbupalayam, Kanyambadi, Tamil Nadu about 3 hours from Madras/Chennai. Five years ago, it was nearly barren land, now it is flourishing with life in various ways. We lived the way most villagers lived, eating the traditional food, sleeping in bamboo thatch tents, washing with bucket water, hardly noticing the almost daily power outages, and so on. One hundred children from 4-10 years old attended this school 6 days a week. Every day, we would be saluted by the kids with smiles saying "good morning, madam" "good afternoon, sir" and sometimes a few high fives. You could see and hear their joy of learning in a peaceful, safe, nurturing space.
As a volunteer work camp, we spent the first week in an intro to Permaculture, lead by Kate, Sugar and Matt, plus a few additions from me since I have my Permaculture certification too. Together at the end of the week, we started the second pile of 18-day compost and built the mandala garden's form that was later planted with symbiotic plants and compost by the 3 permaculture teachers and a few extra hands. From the second to fifth week, the natural building work group was lead by Elke Cole, a natural builder from British Columbia, who grew up and studied architecture in Germany. I worked with her for 3 months at O.U.R. Ecovillage on Vancouver Island this past spring/summer and was invited to India by her to work on this project. We were going to be designing and building a teacher's office/room but from seeing the state of the buildings on site, we decided to put our efforts to repairing them instead. The original classroom was being deteriorated by termites and other insects. This is a common problem for south India and monsoon areas. After doing some research, I found many options for us to try to defend the building. The main culprits seemed to be water brought in by the monsoon season and that someone had used convensional (un-natural) paint all over the natural building, which keeps moisture in the walls. We collectively decided to deal with the moisture problem by installing rainwater collection and sending it to the food forest being developed. As for the damage, we decided to scrape off all the interior and exterior paint, repair the damage and give it a beautiful earthen plaster and new windows and doors. We completed the inside of the main classroom in 4 weeks with around 8 people. While we were at work in that room, local mason men and women did skilled work the other portion of the building and we poked our heads in every so often to learn a few techniques. They learned a few things from us like plaster relief wall sculpture and putting glass bottles in the wall.
I'm very grateful to have had this experience. It was hard work 6 days a week from sun up to sun down but it was so beautiful.
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