Sprouting Seeds Learning Centre

7^th Report for Sprouting Seeds Learning Centre Myanmar

March 19^th, 2016

Dear Family, Friends and Supporters of Sprouting Seeds Learning Centre

As we approach Thingyan, the water festival and, Myanmar’s New Year’s holiday, we look forward to a very new beginning. For the first time in over sixty years the country has a democratically elected leadership and change appears to be coming fast. While there is much to be hopeful about, rapid development and the opening of borders also brings new challenges. It is therefore important that all of us working here in Myanmar continue to respect the long history and rich culture of this beautiful country and it’s people.

Sprouting Seeds Learning Centre Development

Café Opening

February saw Sprouting Seeds Café and bakery open it’s doors for the first time. After a month of intensive woodworking preparing tables, building counters for the baking area and deck chairs for the garden we were ready to welcome our first customers. We aimed for a soft opening with limited space and marketing to give us time to test our product and our processes. We are happy to report things went very well with great feedback on the quality of the food, the service and the concept for the training center. One of our customers even designed a map of town for us to be shared with local businesses and hotels.   We also ran some small cooking lessons for a limited number of customers, which were received very positively. Given the limited number of activities in Kalaw

Partner in USA

We view Sprouting Seeds as a community first and foremost and are always delighted when groups or individuals share the journey with us. It is with great pleasure therefore that we announce the opening of a café at the ???????Middle School where are group of “Sprouting Seeds Juniors” have launched their own café with the aims of supporting our work here in Myanmar. The leadership of their teacher who we met on a trip here has been instrumental in their achievements and we are so proud they are part of our network and hope to invite all the children to visit us one day.

Earthen Counter

Sustainability is key to all that we do here at Sprouting Seeds and wherever possible we want to showcase ways for others to work more sustainably or use more sustainable materials.  As such the training center is a great platform to inspire others to use more natural materials. Therefore we were delighted when an Earthen Builder from Spain came to join us in March and helped build a cob counter for the café. This has already sparked so many conversations with people about the versatility of the material and its aesthetic appeal. Several local community members have already talked about building something for themselves with cob with two joining us for two days to learn how to work with this incredible material.

Strawberry Ice Cream Season

With the start of spring came avocado and strawberry season. We have thoroughly enjoyed working with new recipes making a variety of strawberry treats from ice cream, butter cakes, smoothies, fruit bars and jams. With the weather heating up we now look forward to mango season…our favorite time of the year!