Report on the
COSG gardening brigade,
January 2000

The Gardening Brigade I'm happy to report was a huge success. Though our journey began with a gruelling flight - one hour after taking off from Madrid the pilot announced that we would have to return to Madrid as two of the flight-deck's radios were not working, which meant they had to dump most of our fuel and we watched with trepidation as our fuel poured out in a steady black stream alongside the plane, wondering at the likely waste and pollution this was causing, and we then had an excruciating 5-hour wait in Madrid airport which resulted in one of our members having to be sent to the Medical centre as he became literally sick with exhaustion. We arrived at our hotel in Havana at 6am the following morning as opposed to the expected 10pm the night before. I then had to stay awake in order to meet a tour rep at 8am about our transport arrangements.

But thankfully that was the only real hiccough we experienced during our two weeks. Everyone in the group was incredibly supportive, adaptable, hard-working and great fun! They soon happily adopted the role of being pioneers on a new initiative and helped to make my job as group leader that much easier.

We worked on 4 different projects. The first one was a family garden belonging to Fernandini (who fought with Castro in the Sierra Maestra!). It is one of 3 projects that our hosts the Fundación has received some funding from Oxfam (England) to run as educational projects for farmers and schools incorporating Permaculture principles. It is a wonderful jumble of trees, plants and vegetables and includes a pond filled with tilapia fish.

The second garden is a small patch at the Fundación's headquarters which will function as a show garden of permaculture design for visitors and schools.

The third was an organipanico near the Plaza de la Revolución which has the benefit of input from a woman called Myriam who is one of three government supported workers trained in permaculture to introduce permaculture principles into organipanicos. And a good thing too! A number of us had the experience of planting hundreds of those boring, almost tasteless lettuces that Jenny Bussey mentioned in her report earlier. We gave Myriam packets of varieties of salad vegetables and are sending more.

And the fourth project we worked on was the best one of all - best in terms of our feeling that we had really accomplished something. When Fausto from the Fundación first showed us the site we were appalled to find a wasteground on top of an old bunker covered with hard, dry, tired soil with some tough couch-type grass, strewn with rubbish. It very quickly became referred to as "The Challenge". But in the second week the group managed to transform a large section of the site into a beautiful garden in the shape of a mandala in all of 2 1/2 days much to the amazement of the Fundación and the local community (and to ourselves!). And what was most important about this site was that it was part of a primary school.

When I returned unannounced to the site with Vilda and Pepe after the Brigade had returned to England I was overjoyed to find children in the garden and two members of the community working there. It also provided the opportunity for Vilda and Pepe to explain their 3-heap, above-ground composting technique to the young Cubans who were continuing our work.