Subject: CESTA, El Salvador: Wayne Wadsworth writes about Permaculture

From: [email-masked] (Adam Tiller)
Date: Fri, 8 Sep 1995 19:15:04 +1000

Queridos compan~eros,

Below is a draft of an article for the Christmas 1995 edition of the
Permaculture International Journal. 
 
ARTICLE ABOUT CESTA IN EL SALVADOR FOR THE PERMACULTURE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL 
ATTENTION:  ANA OR STEVE PAYNE.

Permaculture In El Salvador.

Wayne Wadsworth (Wadzy) has recently returned to Australia from El Salvador,
where he has been working for The Centre for Appropriate Technology, CESTA,
for the past year. In the following article Wayne explains Permaculture work 
with Juan Rojas and CESTA.

Juan Rojas has been working in El Salvador teaching Permaculture for the 
past two years.  He is teaching in San Salvador and Morazan.  Morazan is 
in a remote area of El Salvador where Juan has access to a couple of 
hectares of land to help develop a Permaculture project with a local 
peasants co-operative.  Juan and me did our Permaculture course in Crystal
Waters (Queensland, Australia) and had both intended to go to Cuba to help
set up Permaculture there.  Due to delays establishing the project in Cuba,
Juan decided to return to his country and teach Permaculture there. (The
project in Cuba has now been running for two year, with great success). 

Ricardo Navarro, the President of the El Salvadoran Centre for 
Appropriate Technology (CESTA) did a speaking tour of Australia in 1993, during 
which time he asked the Overseas Service Bureau to fund a position for a 
Permaculture worker to teach Permaculture in El Salvador.

Ricardo Navarro was one of the founding members of CESTA which was set up 
about ten years ago to tackle ecological problems facing the country.  
From a very small beginning CESTA now employs 75 people and is the 
biggest ecology/environmment group in El Salvador.  
Ricardo recently received a United Nations prize, a European prize and a
commendation from Nelson Mandela for CESTA's ecology work in El Salvador.

CESTA is divided into four main areas of work:
- GIA, The administrative body of CESTA.  Handles media campaigns.
- EcoBici, Assembles bikes for resale, builds solar reflectors, wood 
saving cookers, bicycle powered machines, solar dryers, small grain silos 
etc.  
- EcoMuna, Works with disadvantaged groups doing mainly social work..
- EcoPrima, Research work into the Ecological problems and solutions 
facing El Salvador.  Eco Prima is responsible for the development of 
Permaculture within CESTA.  They are also responsible for developing EcoCentro.
- EcoCentro, a 25 hectare ecology training centre about thirty kilometres from 
San Salvador.  EcoCentro is being developed strongly along Permaculture 
lines.

EcoPrima.
My first job to do was to establish a team of people in Eco Prima 
who could teach Permaculture.  The team we put together were all highly 
qualified people in their own fields of engineering, agronomy, soils, water 
and plants.  We developed a group of five teachers who's first job was to 
run a four day Introduction to Permaculture course.  I spent two months 
working with the group to set up the course.  The course was divided into 
two weekends, the first weekend was held in the city where we did a lot 
of theory and practical work of showing people how to grow food in small 
areas using containers and wall space.  The second weekend we spent doing 
a very large Mandala garden at EcoCentro.

EcoCentro.
The second part of my job was to help train people to set up zone one and 
two areas at Eco Centro.  I was working with the team we had developed in 
San Salvador and the workers at the centre.  One of the biggest problems 
facing El Salvador is the disappearing water table.  There is virtually 
no forest remaining in San Salvador and most of the water that falls in 
the wet season runs straight off the land, into the highly polluted rivers 
and then out to sea.  So what we were setting up was different examples 
of keeping the water on the land as long as possible, there by allowing 
water to infiltrate into the soils and rebuild the water table.  We used 
swales, water tanks, ponds and clump planting systems to achieve this 
effect.  We also started the process of building a nursery for the plants 
that will be used to develop the site.

The water system was designed to take all the roof water into a 
freshwater tank for personal use, then to overflow into a live swimming 
pool with plants and fish in it, then to overflow into a third plant a 
fish pond shaped like a daisy to maximise growing edge.  The clump 
planting system had a two foot trench around the centre to take up all 
the water for a guild of Luceana in the centre to fix nitrogen and mulch, 
four coconut plants as deep rooted trees to take up deep nutrients, two 
banana plants to take up surface water and nutrients and two papaya 
plants to do the same.  We adapted the design from Bill Mollison's
Permaculture Designer's Manual. We translated had large sections of the
manual Spanish, which was extremely popular!

We had planned to run a Permaculture Design Certificate Course before I left
in August 95, but two bouts of typhoid put an end to that.

I believe I learned a lot more than I taught in El Salvador.  Before 
going I believed big projects was the way to go.  I now think small 
intensive projects are far better, quicker, and have the possibility of 
empowering communities far more than large projects, which need a high 
degree of experts and bureaucracy.  Large projects usually collapse when 
the experts leave and really disempower people with limited education and 
access to knowledge.

CESTA is also promoting a reforestation program in Guazapo, an area of very 
heavy fighting during the ten year civil war.  The area was destroyed 
by chemicals used to kill the vegetation and bombs to kill the guerrillas.
The forest will be dedicated to all the people killed during the war.

CESTA is looking for Permaculture workers.
If you are an Australian interested in a two year paid position
please contact Daniel Knott at the
  Overseas Service Bureau, 
  71 Argyle Street, Fitzroy, Melbourne Vic 3065, Australia  
  Ph: (03) 9419-1788.

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