Dong Kam School Food Garden

Location: Kalasin Province N/E Thailand
Start Date: 22 Jan 2006

Project Concept

• To establish a model project of sustainable Food Garden in the school that will provide safe and clean food for students.
• To be an Out-Door Classroom that will help students develop sensitivities to care for themselves, their friends and the earth. Helping them build skills needed to participate, to learn and to problem solve.

Project Description

The Landscape

Dong Kam is a poor small village of about 150 houses, Located 680 km NE of Bangkok. It is a quite new community compared to other villages around. Most of population work on their own small farm. Rice, sugarcane, and cassava are main crops.

At school: Mud house Training

Our team come to this village and teach them how to build a mud house instead of cement-brick as their first request. In one month time, we not only finished a 4 x 6 metre mud house that is now used as school classroom, but built up an awareness of being self-reliant and bringing back a better relationship among villagers, because almost everyone from children to senior people in this village came to participate in the construction, so they know all the process and can build their own house with mud, which has a very low costs and is environmentally friendly.

We set a small vegetable garden too.

On the 2nd visit, myself, the teacher and the students finish a pig pen. I bought 3 pigs for them from donated money. My friend taught them how to do soil-cement brick and left a machine for them to use to make them. Three months later a small house for guests was finished by these means.

3rd visit, I taught how to create Bio-gas from animal manure, and left a Bio-gas processor, which is made from three 200lt used plastic drums.