What is the origin of the potato? How did this magnificent, delicious food come to be? Peru, of course. It is believed that between 7,000 and 10,000 years ago the potato was domesticated in what is now Peru. The Inca people are famous for selective breeding, resulting in approximately 4,000 different types of potatoes. Moray is a well-known archeological site built and used by the Inca for agricultural experimentation. Here they learned which types of potatoes grew best in different climates and crossbred potatoes to make more resilient varieties.

The potato was a staple food (and continues to be the fourth largest food crop in the world!) of the Inca. It also served medicinal purposes. Raw slices were fixed to broken bones, eaten to end a bellyache, and carried to prevent rheumatism.

In the 1530s, a group of Spaniards entered an Inca village and discovered a funny-looking vegetable inside all of the empty homes. Originally searching for gold and silver, they were saddened to come out empty-handed. Little did they know they found something much more precious – the potato.

Sailors carrying melted gold and silver back to Spain brought the potato as food for the long journey. Shortly after arriving in their homeland, the potato was cultivated and used to feed the masses. They used it to strengthen their society, ultimately leading to the rise of the West. Historian William H. McNeill stated, “By feeding rapidly growing populations, [it] permitted a handful of European nations to assert dominion over most of the world between 1750 and 1950.”

What this basically means is that thanks to the potato, places such as McDonalds are possible today. I’ll take mine super sized. ~Cheryl

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

We hope you can join this important conversation and encourage you to share your own experiences and thoughts with us!

Women in Maucua crushing up plants to make biocida

Often people ask what practitioners of ecological agriculture do to manage pest and plagues. Well there are many different methods that can be used that negate the need for pesticides and other agrochemicals used in conventional agriculture to address these challenges.

For example, we can plant certain plants or flowers around the edges of crops that either repel pests or attract beneficial insects that actually feast on pesky pests. Just properly managing soil fertility contributes significantly to plant resistance to plagues and pests. So essentially everything we do from composting, to soil preparation, to companion planting strengthens plants against environmental threats. Supporting a natural, balanced system reduces the risk of problems. Nonetheless we must also be prepared to address issues as they arise. One easy technique we use is Biocida, a process we learned from a local expert. It is ideal to use with community members because they can gather the ingredients from around their homes, similar to the soil fertility building Biol covered in a past post. Here’s how we prepare Biocida:

Biocida is a natural pest repellent used to both control and prevent pests from attacking plants. It can be used on small plants and should continue to be used on a bi-weekly basis. It can also be used at times when pests are attacking a normally healthy plant. But it is mainly a preventative solution rather than a control once pests have infested a plant.

Ingredients:

• Bitter and aromatic herbs, plants, etc. growing in your garden and wild around your garden – these act as repellents
• Leaf of a Cactus: Ideally the agave cactus or Tuna but any cactus will work – acts as a sticky substance that keeps the solution on the leaves (if you don’t have this, it will still work)
• Water
• Onion – repellent
• Garlic – repellent
• Hot pepper (i.e. a jalapeño) – repellent

Standard Biocida (this is the one we use most often):

• Crush up the plants into small pieces
• Mix in a bucket with water (1/2 plants;1/2 water)
• Let sit for  24 hours so the active ingredients of the plants soak into the water
• Filter out the plant particles inot a backpack or other spraying device
• Dilute with water (i.e. if you have 1 6 liter backpack, 2liters should be bioicida and the rest water)
• Spray on the leaves of all plants

Biocida Tea:

• Boil water
• Add all the leaves, garlic, onion, pepper, and cactus
• Mix into the boiled water and let sit for 2 -3 minutes
• Dilute with more water (1/4 biocida to 3/4 water)
• Spray on leaves of all plants

Biocida Infusion

• Place plants in a bucket with boiled water. Use a bucket that can be hermetically sealed for about 10 minutes. If using stems, roots, or plants with hard outer leaves, you may need to leave them in the infusion for 20-30 mins.
• Spray on the leaves of plants

 Notes:

• The spray is strong. Don’t spray on plants you plan to harvest within the next week
• Apply after watering plants and don’t water for 12 hours after to prevent the bioicida from washing off the leaves

 Enjoy pest free plants! ~Kat

Click here to read the article if you haven’t already.

Community development: what does it mean to me?  Unfortunately, it’s not that simple and really I’m not the community in question.  I’ll be quite frank, I’ve operated under the assumption that the communities I want to work with will want money and a sustainable income.  It is strange that I never really thought of this as an assumption before but I guess that’s how assumptions work.

Initially working with the Andean Alliance, I felt unsure that I understood their methods.  “Why is it taking so long to get anything done?” I thought, however, I understand now that they operate much differently than most internationally organizations do which is quite refreshing, and a bit confusing.

I won’t say that I think the Andean Alliance is assumption-free, however, I do think that their method of slow development helps to remedy some assumptions they might make on behalf of the community.  They also use the adaptive management approach, and shift their focus as the communities’ needs change.  Taking the CSC workshop from two prominent founding members of the AASD (as professors) allowed us to question our assumptions together and gave me a great deal of respect for their method and how I could incorporate it into my own work.

Developing a framework for understanding how to repeat the process of community social change is incredibly difficult and involves far too many factors and variables that need to be addressed.  The most apparent observation is that there is ambiguity, so adaptability is essential.

Team Peru began as a January term project lasting less than three weeks.   This January, I spent three weeks with two current students and three former students of MIIS (half of the current AASD staff).  We traveled to remote villages and at one point became fully-fledged members in an annual corn harvest celebration. Our main Team Peru objective was to develop a partnership model between a honey bee sanctuary and AASD in order to establish community growth through educational programs.  These programs focused on the natural benefits of honey bee populations for agriculture, as well as the possible economic benefits of products coming from an active honey bee colony, a super-organism vital to healthy ecosystems.  The relevance of our project was immediate as the community saw great value in honey bees and what they offer.  The education and inclusion/contribution of locals was a paramount goal.

A community project that involved two organizations run by Americans working in Peru is a broad concept with an outcome that is not inherently obvious.  What is obvious is how these communities have come to embrace the AASD at a level that eludes many NGOs, regional governments, and a myriad of other actors.  AASD has strong community ties to a variegated group of villages that are relatively isolated but still welcome visitors and people that they consider part of their community.

I spent two months as a part of Team Peru last summer, working on a photo project in the small village of Pampacorral. I wanted to take part in the Community Social Change workshop because I thought it would be a great opportunity to reflect upon my experience in Peru in relation to community development. As we were discussing the Sacred Valley context and the different communities, I could picture it all in my head. I could see the colorful weaving products, the smiling kids with red cheeks and even the llamas and alpacas. Having the experience in Peru was definitely a big bonus for me, and it made the workshop more interesting and understandable. At the same time I think the things we discussed can be applied all over the world, including in our own backyards.

I really enjoyed critically examining the concept of community development over the weekend. Community is everywhere, and while we tend to discuss it as if it was a set entity, community is so much more than that. Our discussion about coffee on Saturday morning made me realize how many communities I am a part of; my “friends from high school” community at home, my family, Oslo, Norway, the MIIS community, the community of people that love coffee and so on. Community is about having something in common. In the development context, it is useful to define communities as set collections of people, but when we do this, we fail to recognize the many different communities within this community.

I am not always comfortable with the idea that I can enter a community I am not a part of to “create” social change. What this workshop made me realize is that there are many ways to become part of a community. I might not speak the same language or believe in the same religion, but I might have other things in common with the community. I think it is important to look for similarities rather than differences when trying to create a common ground. That way we can understand each other better and together create social change.

Over the course of the semester, I worked with a group to write a case study of the Andean Alliance’s work with the Wiñay Warmy weaving group in Choquecancha. We were tasked with learning about the project, the primary stakeholders, what was working, what wasn’t, and what changes could potentially be made to improve the project. Over the last weekend, our Community Social Change class met to discuss 6 different case studies focused around the work of the AASD and other NGOs working in the area.  The experience was incredibly useful for me to contextualize my understanding of the process of community social change.  I was also very surprised by how much the AASD was able to accomplish over the period of a few years, and how much they had learned and grown as an organization in that time.  In all of their projects, they are always putting the interests of the community first.  This organization truly lives by the value of “do no harm,” and I greatly admire that, because it is a value which is lacking in so many other non-profits working in the area.

The main concept I took away from this weekend workshop was the idea that sometimes development and community social change should focus more on the process rather than simply the outcomes. Lasting and sustainable change happens slowly, we can’t rush the process, and this is an important lesson to keep in mind as so many “western” development organizations place so much emphasis on efficiency and getting things done quickly. Get in and get out. But that kind of mindset can do much more harm than good, and leave communities facing the greater issues of dependency. If we allow ourselves to truly listen to and work with the members of these developing communities, the outcomes can inherently be much more sustainable and have a greater impact. The AASD still faces many challenges in being able to do the work they wish to do, but they are on the right path, and they have the support of the MIIS community behind them.

One of the takeaways from the past weekend for me has been the usefulness of even ad-hoc, informal frameworks. Our class ended up seeing “community social change” as a process that touches upon 9 natural categories: Power, participatory development and ownership, process versus outcome indicators, networking, solidarity and agency, accountability and legitimacy, community identity and its origins, social justice, and a focus on continuity, patience, and process. Over the course of our discussions following the creation of this framework, we were able to make use of it in coming back and improving content that had been generated from discussions without any framework to guide it.

Looking over the categories above I feel like our class developed a good start at approaching the idea of community social change, but that we really only ended up with a first draft by the end of the weekend. Our framework, in order to be something transportable beyond the discussions that were held around its creation, needs clarification in many areas. Many of the categories are double or even triple barreled, and almost all of them have the same level of specificity as an I Ching category.  It’s one thing to divide the world at a set of joints that a group has collectively decided to bring into existence, it is another to actually locate those joints in the world.

Conducting research and preparing case studies prior to actually participating in the Community Social Change workshop really helped clarify the situation in the Peruvian Sacred Valley (PSV). It allowed us to observe the many activities and key issues surrounding the numerous stakeholders in that region. During the workshop itself, we delved deeper and gained insights into the development philosophies and behaviors of the Andean Alliance for Sustainable Development (AASD) and other NGO’s in the PSV.

The AASD has taken a different approach to community development than other NGOs in that region by placing greater focus on the development process and emphasizing the importance and significance of building long-term relationships with the PSV locals. This community development approach is in contrast to the current and generally accepted outcome approach which heavily emphasizes concrete assessments, metrics, and evaluations over some prescribed timeline. The AASD approach can be more clearly described as a kind of intentional “hands-off” intervention (if it could even be classified as an intervention), where the process of development evolves from a community over an undetermined period of time. In this scenario, AASD strives only to provide ‘aid’ in a very un-intrusive way by waiting for a local community to approach them and request AASD’s assistance to accomplish a particular project (i.e. build a greenhouse). Only then, does AASD provide assistance to that community by providing training and mentoring, and occasionally accompanying a community leader to visit the Peruvian government offices. AASD’s methodology is in sync with the rhythm of each individual community. It works in conjunction with the drive and desires of that unique community – when it is ready to accept something new into its culture. In this sense, AASD “follows the energy” and responds to or compliments that energy with ‘aid’.

The Community Social Change workshop provided an opportunity for students and AASD to share and receive a wide array of ideas surrounding current community development, future community development, and the potential for social enterprise specifically in the PSV. It was extremely thought provoking and laid the ground work for potential transformations within current community development philosophies for all of us.