Santa
Barbara Permaculture Network
Permaculture
Around the World Series
"From the Mara
Soil" film screening
Permaculture & Abundant Living in
Rural East Africa
Tanzania
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Thursday, Dec 9, 7pm-9pm
2010, Donation $5
Santa Barbara Central Library, Faulkner Gallery
Join Santa Barbara
Permaculture Network as it continues its Permaculture Around the
World series, highlighting the path of Permaculture around the
globe, this time in Tanzania, East Africa.
What if
global hunger, poverty and disease could be solved with the natural and
abundant resources already at our disposal? From the Mara
Soil, a stunning film directed by Steve Schrenzel,
transports you to a community in rural Tanzania trying to answer this
question with a novel approach to solving humanity's greatest
challenges---with simple, natural, and affordable solutions, many
inspired by Permaculture.
The Mara
region of Tanzania is one of the poorest in Africa. Nestled between
beautiful Lake Victoria and the famous Serengeti Plain, it is home to
approximately 1.3 million residents, with a per capita income for most
households of less than fifty cents per day. As one community
member states in the opening of the film "In Tanzania, we
don't have war, we don't have dictator, we only have poverty".
This abject poverty creates untold stresses and challenges for both the
people and the environment.
Global
Resource Alliance (GRA) based in Ojai, CA, is an organization
dedicated to bringing hope, joy and abundance to the world's most
impoverished regions, and has a Center located in Musoma, a small city in
the Mara region of Tanzania. Their work includes assistance to AIDS
orphans, malaria prevention, primary rock water resource development,
alternative energy strategies, solar cooking, micro-finance, and
currently a permaculture focus on nearby Kinesi, a village of 5000 on
the banks of Lake Victoria, where the film takes place.
Attending
the "Permaculture & Sustainable Aid for the 21st Century"
three day conference hosted by Santa Barbara Permaculture Network in 2006
with permaculture teacher Geoff Lawton from Australia, GRA co-founders
Lyn Hebenstreit and Tara Blasco were inspired to host a
Permaculture Design Course (PDC) with Geoff in Musoma the following
year. This design course resulted in many local PDC graduates and a
permaculture plot at the Musoma GRA Center, already evolving into a lush
model for the surrounding area.
In 2009,
members of the Musoma GRA Center traveled to Malawi Africa to attend
the 9th International Permaculture Convergence (IPC9), where
wonderful connections with others practicing permaculture in Africa took
place. Julious Piti and Alias Mlambo, long time permaculturists
from the Chikukwa Ecological Land Use Community Trust, Chimanimani
district Zimbabwe, were hired to assist with the design of Kinesi
Village. Being aware that Tanzania is in the center of Africa, the
hope is these positive strategies and models will radiate out to the rest
of the continent, leaving poverty and despair behind.
Please
join Santa Barbara Permaculture Network as we share the dedicated and
enlightened work of Global Resource Alliance co-founders, Lyn Hebenstreit
and Tara Blasco. Film-maker Steve Schrenzel will also be in
attendance. Santa Barbara Permaculture Network was honored to have
visited the GRA Center in Tanzania last year on the way to Malawi for the
International Permaculture Convergence (to read more about this visit go
to
http://www.sbpermaculture.org/talkstory.html).
The event
takes place on Thursday, December 9, 7-9 pm at the downtown
Santa Barbara Public Library, 40 East Anapamu St, Santa Barbara, CA.
Donation $5, no reservations needed. For more information visit our
website at
www.sbpermaculture.org
More
Info:
From the Mara Soil
-- Film Trailer:
-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJMaY8ZanD8
- FROM THE MARA SOIL
takes you to a stunning but impoverished region in Tanzania, where a
handful of activists are fighting food scarcity, water shortage, disease,
health problems, and deforestation by teaching their people to use Mother
Nature to lift themselves out of poverty.
- Produced by Global Resource Alliance. Directed by Steve
Schrenzel.
Global Resource Alliance
(GRA) makes a commitment to help reach the United Nations Millennium
Development goal to reduce by half, the number of people suffering from
abject poverty, hunger and lack of access to clean water and basic
sanitation by the year 2015. To learn more:
www.globalresourcealliance.org
For more information about International Permaculture Convergences
(IPC) visit:
www.ipcon.org. The
next IPC will be in the Middle East in Jordan, the Fall of 2011.
The theme will be water.
www.ipcon.org
(805) 962-2571
P.O. Box 92156, Santa Barbara, CA 93190
margie@sbpermaculture.org
www.sbpermaculture.org