Provide Vegetable Gardens for Families in Brazil

Dear donors and Project friends.

Project "Provide Vegetable Gardens for Families in Brazil" pursues on its objectives to offer assistance for persons, families or communities wanting to establish organic vegetable gardens or low cost tree nurseries. Due to new donations to SALVEASERRA, our NGO, we are enlarging our horizons, as you will see.

The first thing I would like to report is that our other GlobalGiving project, “Trees and Education Protects the Atlantic Rainforest”, bought from Antonio dos Santos that received a tree nursery from this project in 2010, 167 saplings of different Rainforest trees, palm trees and fruit trees. Antonio sells saplings from his tree nursery at the local market, increasing his income. His saplings are already at the Serra da Concordia Wildlife Sanctuary tree nursery, were we produced our Atlantic Rainforest seedlings. This year we bought other 1100 seedlings with the help Tree and Education project donors. These saplings will be planted late this year. Please see attached pictures.

The project continues to work with the Cambota Community where we are presenting them a new proposal that is to discuss with the neighborhood their future and what possible actions can be taken to prepare them for it.

This new project in the project is called: The vision of your future. What do you think about it? What can you do about it?

It has four points:

1. Develop Environmental Awareness in the community.

2. Promote citizenship, organization, training and qualification of local inhabitants, always searching and seeking ways to improve wellbeing, with more and better work, jobs and income.

3. Produce locally fresh and health food and fruit, on personal and/or communal vegetable gardens, in backyards and in the numerous vacant spaces that can be found in the area.

4. Introduce the concepts of Permaculture.

"Permaculture is a method and movement developed during the 1970s to assist people to become more self reliant through the design and development of productive and sustainable communities and its gardens and farms. Permaculture ecologically seeks to develop sustainable human settlements and agricultural systems, designing them to attempt to be a natural ecosystem. The word "permaculture" originally referred to "permanent agriculture" but was expanded to also stand for "permanent culture," and can described as "a philosophy of working with, rather than against nature; of protracted and thoughtful observation rather than premature and thoughtless labor; and of looking at plants and animals in all their functions, rather than treating any area as a single project system. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture. More information on the theme can be easily obtained.

As first steps to Permaculture, we plan to teach and train this community how to make low cost: 1. Composts tumblers from plastic pickle barrel, to recycle organic matter from schools and homes, 2. Red worms composting bins, also to recycle domestic kitchen wastes. 3. Solar water heaters that can reduce greatly electric showers bills and 4. Use of plastic soda bottles as light source. See an example here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHTD_RX3J2I.

The compost produced will be used as organic fertilizer for our vegetable gardens.

Recently the project was presented to Residents Association direction in a meeting in my house which was followed by a visit to the community. To the Cambota community we are proposing a partnership and a collective effort to renovate and recondition a square and the dressing room of a football (soccer) field, applying different permacultural construction techniques, as the superadobe and the earth paint for walls panting. We want to introduce the techniques and finance all the necessary materials and they would provide a task force to do the work in a couple of weekends. The negotiations continues. Please see attached pictures.

In another activity, recently we promoted a course of Container Gardening that can become one of the most important tools to combat hunger and malnutrition. All over the world people are producing their own fresh food in many different types of containers and many are also decorating their houses with ornamental plants in containers, which is a practical idea for gardening, both in urban and in rural areas. Please see attached photos of the course.

“Provide Vegetable Gardens for Families in Brazil” project is essential for the success of the work of SALVEASERRA, offering a real chance for us to interact with communities and help to improve economical, social and environmental situation, preparing them for a better future in this difficult and problematic world.

Thank you very much for your help and support.

Roberto Lamego