For ten days our team travelled to Tamil Nadu for visiting the Keystone Foundation and Auroville, where they learned through several workshops, discussions and field trips a lot about sustainable livelihood.
Keystone is situated in the beautiful Nilgiris area where they are working and creating together with the local people and partner organisations great projects which are based on their mission "to enhance the Quality of Life and the Environment with Indigenous Communities using Eco-development Approaches”. Fieldwork is very important for working in this huge area so there are several teams working in different fields. There is a Research Team, which is collecting and keeping records of all the seeds they can find in the forest and a Team, which is taking care of the water conservation. Furtheremore they have many bee colonies, for which another team takes responsibility and they started a Community Radio where they are talking about women issues.
For our field team, the first day of their exposure visit to Keystone was filled with a detailed introduction about the work of Keystone, about their partners, products and visions. On the second day they were taken to Banjalopadigai, a very small village, where a group of women is producing wax candles, nutmeg powder, healing balms and pillows out of silk cotton. They could follow the whole formation process of each product and learned a lot.
On the third day they joined a class about marketing and discussed about general questions like the basics you have to consider while planning marketing, how to avoid potential problems, the importance of calculating costs and corporations with investors etc. This topic filled two days.
The fifth day was an adventure day into the forest. A guide showed them the first tree of the forest, wetland, special roots and they observed some special species. Located near the border between Tamil Nadu and Karnataka there is a small village named Hassanur: Here the processing, cleaning, packing and labelling of the honey is taking place. Besides they are baking ragi biscuits and making many varieties of Pickles. Out of Blackberries they are producing medicine against cancer as well. From the berries to the medicine or from the grain to the biscuit they explained everything in a detailed way so that everybody learned how to clean, to powder, to operate the machine etc.
On the last days at Keystone they joined a course about PGS and how to get the Certification about organic farming. Farmers from the villages came and shared their experiences and explained the rules.
The next destination was Auroville where our Team stayed for three days. Auroville has a beautiful Campus where you will find art and handicrafts in every corner. The Auroville community is growing a huge herbal plantation where all kind of medicine plants are growing, which their own nursery is using. They are breeding Spirulina Plants as well. A guide showed our Team around the forest and explained them the belief in not killing animals and how to collect the poison of snakes for making medicines against cancer. Furthermore our team went to a village nearby, where Auroville established a model school, for which the curriculum is based on environmental issues. Continuously the teachers are planting trees with the school kids and cooking is only done with their self-grown vegetables for example. Furthermore they don´t waste any water: Special plants are purifying the wastewater, which then can be used for cleaning or gardening.
Our Team enjoyed every day a lot and is very thankful for getting such a detailed overview about all the different projects. Thereby they left Keystone and Auroville with a mind full of inspiration and new ideas for projects at home.