Sprouting Seeds Learning Centre

Dear Friends and Family, 

A warm holiday greetings to you all and best wishes for the upcoming new year! 

As many of you know, the political and economic situation here in Myanmar continue to spiral in a difficult and extremely challenging direction for everyone. Due the situation over the last few months, including power outages, we have had to temporarily put a hold on most of our trainings running through our cafe/bakery training in Kalaw. 

Now that the heavy rainy season is over and more stable power and internet supplies (fingers crossed!), we are currently in the process of starting our programs again here in town. 

We are still settling into the new building and making arrangement to be able to host more interns through our teacher training program and also to be able to host and train larger groups in the upcoming year. 

We aim to take another new batch of interns at the farm starting the first of the new year and look forward to share the news of the growth and development of the program. 

We greatly appreciate your ongoing support and could not make it through this challenging times without your kindness and generousity. 

With good weather ahead for the next few months it also means the interns will be able to continue working with us also in the village at our Whispering Earth Training Centre located in the rural ethnic Danu village outside of Kalaw. 

We are thankful for all your continued support and look forward to sharing more news in the coming months! 

Happy holidays to you all and warmest wishes for a happy and healthy new year!!! 

Sprouting Seeds Family

Dear Friends and Family, 

We trust you are all doing well and staying safe these days. We continue to do our best here in Myanmar with the on-going covid 19 situation and also a very insecure political situation across the entire country. 

We are getting more settled in our new space here in Kalaw. We continue to run our internship program here at Sprouting Seeds to youth and adults from around the country.  We also continue to use our new building as a space to host trainings and meetings for various groups from around the country. 

Newest member of Sprouting Seeds Family!
We are excited to share about our latest addition to our family here in Kalaw. Back at the end of March, our little Gu Gu (Aliyah) joined our family! With her arrival, she makes one of us a Grandpa!! Everyone is happy and healthy and she is growing too fast!

Monsoon Season Trainings and Planning
With heavy monsoon season upon us, we slowly retreat indoors and continue to work on our plans for the upcoming winter and dry seasons. 

With another upcoming group of new interns on their way we are excited to plan and implement new projects and products here at our centre in Kalaw aimed at the high season this coming winter. 

We are redesigning some of the spaces to accommodate more people and will start the renovations outdoors once the monsoon season slows down. We are looking forward to providing more trainings in the coming months and start on the renovations as soon as possible!  

We are grateful for all the continued support.  It means so much especially as we go through such challenging times here in Myanmar. We look forward to sharing more news with you over the next few months! 

Sprouting Seeds Family!

Dear Friends and Family, 

We wish all of you are staying healthy and safe as we all navigate our way through a strange and different world. 

Here in Myanmar we still face a current wave of Omicron sweeping through the country and the beginning of the 2^nd year an unstable political situation. 

We had difficulties securing a new location for Sprouting Seeds Learning Centre here in downtown Kalaw, but finally found a new location to rent in the beginning of January.  

We are fortunate to have found a beautiful new building with lots of potential for our café and training centre. 

Internship Program and Our New Location
We got moved in during the month of January and started the Internship program again in February after everything stopping for almost 2 years due to the Covid 19 pandemic. 

We have 5 interns living and training with us here at the centre for a minimum of 3 months. During their time they are managing and learning everything about running the café, bakery and eco shop. 

The interns are also taking time to work at Whispering Earth Living and Learning Centre, our 17 acre training centre in the village, where they are learning all about natural building and natural plasters, farming and also running a youth camp for children from the local village. 

We are so thankful to be settled once again and start to work in training once again.  We hope the political situation will get easier, as well as the world health situation. 

Your support means so much to us, especially during these continuing challenging times! 

We look forward to sharing more developments with you over the next few months. 

Dear Friends and Family, 

We trust you are all doing well and staying safe and healthy as we head into cold weather in many places around the world. 

As you may have read in our last report, it continues to be a challenging time here in Myanmar with the covid situation slowly easing up at the moment, but a political situation that does not provide much positive hope for the future. 

You also may remember that we are being forced out of the café where we have been for the last 3 years. We are very sad to be leaving this place. 

We fortunately have found a new place which, as usual needs a great deal of tender loving care! We have just been able to start cleaning the outside of the property. With a large garden space, several old fruit trees including guava, avocado, mango and pears we are excited to start to do our design work!

The inside of the building will also need much care, as the building has not been cared for or lived in for many, many years. Scrubbing, cleaning, painting and lots of design work, we hope to transform this old building into our new training centre in the next month! 

As the rains are slowing down and the cold winter weather approaches, we hope to be able to move into the building as soon as possible and start our project once again. With our aim to open around the new year, we are looking at all new programs and products to fit with the changing times here in Myanmar. 

We want to thank you all for your support, especially during these extremely challenging times we all face here in Myanmar. We look forward to a safer and healthier time when we may all meet each other face to face. We hope this time is not far off! 

Wishing you all a safe and healthy time!

Dear Friends and Family,

We hope this finds you doing well and staying safe wherever you may be.

As many of you may know, the situation in Myanmar grows increasingly challenging with each month. Currently the entire country is being hit with a devastating 3rd wave of Covid 19. With shortages of oxygen and no vaccinations available it is spreading rapidly throughout all corners of the country.

Due to this current devastating situation along with the political instability for the last 6 months our trainings and projects here at Sprouting Seeds have been put on hold temporarily.

We have continued to work on the grounds around the café and also develop our future programs, but day to day operations and trainings have been forced to come to a halt. We are unsure as to when we will be able to restart the projects and programs through our training centre here in downtown Kalaw.

Sprouting Seeds Moving Locations Again
As many of you know, we had to move our location 2 and half years to our new location. As sad and difficult as it is, we have just been informed by the owner of our current buildings that he wants us to move out, they no longer want to rent the building for us to use as café, bakery and training centre.

After all of the work and energy we put into this new place just over 2 years ago, we now have to find a new place. To make matters even worse, we are having to move admist a major Covid 19 pandemic and in the middle of a huge political instability within the country.

We have roughly 4-5 months to find a new place and move our training centre which works as our café, bakery, eco-shop, yoga studio and organic gardens. We are deeply saddened with this news as we put so much energy into this new place expecting to be here for the long term. We will keep you posted on our progress of moving to the new training centre.

Herb Spiral
As with many things that we created here at our new location, we only will be able to enjoy the a little longer. We shared that during the 2^nd Covid lockdown a few months ago, we made huge progress in the gardens here at Sprouting Seeds with a beautiful Her Spiral. 

The good news is that we turned one of the most neglected areas of the garden into a beautiful centre piece of the garden. We have been able to enjoy so many herbs, spices and veggies and wanted to share the images of it in full bloom.

As we begin our search for a new location for the training centre and start our packing of things once again, we also our spending our time and energy in village when permitted. 

As we continue stay under strict curfews and stay at home orders, we continue to put our energy and time into Whispering Earth Learning Centre, (Myanmar Youth Training Centre). We are still able to travel to the rural training site located outside of Kalaw to continue on developments of the project there. Although this is also extremely limited, we are still able to do some planning and development of the buildings, land and grounds of the 14 acre training centre. 

We hope for some political stability in the country soon as well as the easing of the spreading of Covid 19.  In the meantime we search for a new and better place to re-open our training centre, continue our work on the development of Whispering Earth and all of our programs serving the local communities. 

Wishing you warmest regards, 

Sprouting Seeds Family