Oaxacan Partner Opens Training Center, Celebrates 20 Years

This past weekend (Nov. 21-23), I traveled down to Oaxaca, Mexico, to attend the 20th Anniversary celebration of Coffee Kids’ partner, CAMPO. They also dedicated their new training center, which they built with support from Coffee Kids.

The new training center teaches by example. It was built using an environmentally-friendly compacted earth technique. Similar to adobe, it involves building molds and compacting dirt to form a solid wall. A water catchment system below the building collects rainfall in two large cisterns. The thick walls keep the building cool in the summer and warm when the temperature drops. CAMPO also has a number of demonstration projects to teach visitors from throughout the state of Oaxaca about organic gardening, permaculture, composting, fish farming, grey water treatment and bee keeping.

Over 800 people attended the celebration. Before dinner was served, I gave a few words about the importance of CAMPO’s work and presented them with a certificate from Coffee Kids on behalf of all of our supporters to honor their work improving the quality of life in the entire region.

After dinner I ran into Pedro Osorio. We’d met a year earlier when Coffee Kids staff visited the community of Santa Cruz Tepetotutla, a far-flung community clinging to a mountainside in the Sierra Mixteca. He told me about their efforts to develop a new cooperative for coffee farmers in the area and a number of their efforts to diversify local income. When we last visited the community, they were working on a small eco-hotel for tourists. Santa Cruz is in the middle of a globally-important nature preserve and many in the community have learned the importance of conserving their natural resources and how it can be marketed to attract tourists. Hope I can get back there for a visit some day.

After dinner, Jose Carlos Leon Vargas and Jose Luis Zarate from our Oaxaca office and I interviewed Eduardo Torres Navarrete, one of the founders of CAMPO. We had a great conversation and it’s easy to understand why CAMPO has been so effective over the past 20 years thanks to his leadership. I’ll be posting excerpts from our interview with him soon.

Thanks to all of our supporters who have make the projects we support possible. These efforts are making a great difference. If you’d like to see more pictures from the event, please visit our Flickr page. If you’d like to support Coffee Kids efforts, Coffee Kids donate page and make your contribution today.

This is a great milestone, it seems to me, for the people of Oaxaca, as well as the rest of us! 

I love the NGOs that are spreading the “rich compost” of knowledge regarding practices like rainwater catchment, organic farming, self-sufficiency (such as solar power), and the like!  Like many who love such things, I enjoy engaging in such practices myself, here in the States, and supporting organizations, like Coffee Kids, that teach others in places like Oaxaca, the “how to” part! 

I think it may not be long before such things garner more support here at home, and we become (I hope!) more like Europe, which is quite-a-ways ahead of us in this regard.

Well, good luck with your endeavors!  I will continue to support Coffee Kids, and other organizations like Sustainable Harvest International, Trees, Water, People, and Oxfam . . .