CASAdelDRAGON in Cervera del Maestre in Castellon is a hotspot of contemporary art and invited the musician Andreu Ubach to perform one night with his extraordenary sound sculptures in the gallery.

Ubachs instruments are manufactured by himself, inspired by the Bachet brothers.

On Monday night Ubach explained and played on various sound sculptures and invited the guests to join the social process of making the sound of love.

In the beginning everybody was to shy to touch one of the impressive instruments. But Ubach and his charme moved everybody to join the performance.

Finding his own rhythm again and again and stimulate the other players to join his sequences is a big challenge for a professional drummer like Jordi Effe. But finally after more than 2 hours of constaniously playing the sound became a solid body and emitted some beautiful sequences of impressive melodies.

By changing position and instrument the group discovered again and again new rhythms and collages of sound pieces.

The very special accoustic environment of the little exhibition space in the house of the dragon moved the sound to magical impressions.

Overall we have to say thank you to Andreu Ubach for his short visit. We also want to underline the big help of Cecile in preparing the space and performing with Andreu in such an harmonic way that all guests where fascinated and impressed and highly motivated to join the performance.

The invitation to join social art projects is a neverending challenge for our community and we hope, guests like Jordi will carry these invitations ot other members of the village and abroad.

We grabbed some videos and sounds and we will publish it soon as possible.

In early summer 2019 Mihaela and Laura invited me to offer a workshop as part of her alternative schooling project in the village of Valenii de Munte, one and a half hours far from Bucharest.

To raise a child, it takes a whole village

african saying

Mihaela Stinghe (mother of 2 children, located in Bucharest) is doing homeschooling since more than 5 years and she developed several strategies to improve the outcome of her desire of an alternative and valuable education for her children. On one side she invites as much as possible other youth to join her activities and in summer 2019 she organised a little summer camp in her countryside mansion. On the other she invites other mothers like Laura to join the educative part and to expand the possibilities for the kids to develop relations to various adults.

With my invitation she went a step further. She challenged herself and the group to interact with a foreigner by using a foreign language and to share leadership in the design of daily activities.

In a first step the kids had to move hundred of old bricks from an neighbors garden to the right location, to select broken once, to pile them under different criteria.

They washed the bricks by using water from a river nearby and the tagged the wooden construction by drawing the outline of their hands and adding their names.

The youth measured the basement, cutted some roofing felt and calculated the amount of bricks we would need to create the basement of the oven. Then they started to fill the gaps between the stones with mortar.

Like baking a cake they tried to follow again and again the right recipe to mix the mortar and to finish the foundation (6 and + 2 cal + 2 cement + water). They also figured out how to center the iron barrel to define the fire chamber location on top of the basement.

The fire chamber under the iron barrel will heat up the inside of the barrel and therefor it has to carry the barrel. The engaged brick layer is discovering a suitable strategy to put bricks in place as well as not to loose the shape of the design of the chamber.

With creating the fire chamber we finished the first day of the workshop. The four stones at the top corners will support the iron barrel.

In the second day the youth continued the work to clean bricks, to select right dimensions, to mix mortar and to add them in a stable way to the construction. The preliminary end is shown on the left photo.

Organic education is a way to implement a social space for self orientated learning of youth in a natural environment. Some ingredients have to take place to improve alternative education.

Adults are initiating an activity and they are explaining goal, milestones, reason and motivation to do it. They advertise for help. They give up control in any step soon as possible and don’t try to push the outcome nor the daily results. They don’t judge about the individual contributions to the group result. They accept a different progress for all individuals. They even accept errors and failures as much as possible and if these mistakes need to be fixed they used them to offer the youth to develop strategies to fix it or to find workarounds.

They also accept all limitations of a given situation (technical or logistical problems or economic challenges). They explain their motives for any kind of interventions.

Homeschooling can be part of organic education if it leads to these habits of guidance. The isolation of one teacher in a classical school class is not a good foundation of sustainable learning, therefor also the single mother at home might be not a good idea.

Informal education is based on the social space in with a individual kid can decide about subject, teacher and time. In this workshop my subject was defined but it was so open and weak that below every youth could find a suitable activity (calculating, moving bricks, brick laying, mixing mortar, cleaning bricks or even playing basket ball, cooking, serving lunch or dinner).

More and more the Romanian society is suffering from loosing well-educated youth to other European countries. The only way throughout this might be to redesign education and to support initiatives like Mihaelas and to explore and develop alternative ways.

We have to realize that homeschooling might not be a solution for all youth in a society, because not all parents are capable to deliver this. Organic education is a way of education more than a quality of classical or alternative environments. It could take place in both, and it could lead to a future in which it might be a link between classical and alternative education, to gather the best of both ways.

Thanks to Mihaela, Laura, Pic and Serban for the opportunity to enjoy this experience. Thanks to Familiafeliz and my social network to cover costs and to support this workshops.

In summer 2019 ApeaL, a romanian NGO located in Bucharest, organized a new informal educative event for youth in the villages around Ciocanesti. It was the 10th edition of this summer school.

Serban Moldoveanu, the founder of CTS / ApeaL, invited me to offer a special workshop. According to my last contribution in 2018 – a workshop about lyrics only for girls – i proposed a workshop catering only for boys.

The workshop took place in the garden and open kitchen of Serbans property, which he used for a daily plenum after the summer school. This gathering of trainers and members of the management team – all recuited as youth out of the last years workshops – is always starting with a lunch.

My offer was, to organise this catering with youth as a workshop, challenging the mentality of the romanin boys a bit.

But it was also a challenge for myself.

Every day arround 10.30 am we started with cleaning up the workspace. Every day we talked about cleaning hands and tools and the responsability to cook for a number of staff members running the summer school as trainer of manager.

Every day we placed the raw food and herbs in order ( mostly 3 or 4 course menues). Every day we decided a responsible person for every course.

Every day we finished our task at 1.30 pm ready to serve the lunch.

My first challenge was the budget. As many NGOs ApeaL stick on private sponsors and personal engagement and one big donation didnt arrived.

Another challenge was the daily uncertanty about the guests we have to host for the lunch. We calculated for 30 menues, bit finally we had between 33 and 47 muenues per day.

The most challenging circumstance was not to know who would join my workshop. So every day we had a surprise, who was showing up. Beside a young guy named Robert and in the second week another guy named David there was no stability in the group, beside my brave and entusiastic german assistent Luzia.

Even a free translater was not in place every time.

The error is the source of innovation.

Juan Petry

This workshop was also a big challenge for all team members. Every day at a fixed time we had to be prepared for the guests, no second chance, no excuses. Doesnt mapper what happened before, we had to work out a tasty and healthy solution for all.

This summer school, as many other educative initiatives in the field of informal learning, was an eye opener for me. The uncertanty about my staff crew explained me a fundamental difference in organising informal educational events. The kids where moving from one workshop to another. Like cherry picking they moved independent through all workshops and decided day by day where they wanted to show up.

And this seems to be not a fault, it seems to be a key feature of informal education.

Nevertheless we had every day enough youth in the team, even some girls shoed up and helped a lot.

I was not upset about this, because it gave me another chance to rewire the classical mentality in my own mindset a bit. These girls where looking boys in the kitchen working intensivly in having a good lunch for everybody. They get a real image from a boy putting onions or cleaning dishes and tools on the way to prepare the food.

Maybe these young woman will return in more classical orientated families, they will never forget the image of a boy cleaning and supporting actively the daily task of preparing the food.

One side effect of the workshop was even challenging the guests: no meat! The totally vegetarian food was accepted and we did our best to accomplish the mission by adding nice desserts and cakes and interesting variations of salads and vegetables.

We also started a documentation of this workshop for future summer schools as a blue print. We served more than 350 menues in 10 days of the workshop.

Lets put it in a quizz:
1. How many water we used for this (cleaning, cooking, drinking)?
2. How many waste we generated(paper, glas,plastic)?
3. How many manpower (hours per person) we spend on this catering at all (including shopping)?
4. How may money we spend per menue (3 or 4 or 5 courses)?

I will answer these questions in a later post 🙂 (link will be placed here)

Every day after lunch we came together for a plenum session to discuss the activities and challenges of the day and to place some requirements facing the management team. Part of it was also a direct feedback for our workshop result: in general they liked it a lot, especially sweet cakes amd fresh salads. Some where maybe to shy to apply for meat but everybody accepted the outcome.

I calculated with a group of 6 youth, in average i had 7, because of jumping from one workshop to another finally more tha 25 youth worked for one or more days in our team.

A lot of times we ask ourselves about the sustainable results of such an event, mostly trainers are motivated by having a change, a kind of development comparing start and end of a workshop. It was totally unpredictable what the real outcome will be. We will not know now, if it was a single event in the life of these boys or an important gate to develop in a certain different direction.

The only thing we are able to see is the growth of all these copii di Ciocanesti over the years, forming a happy family in time and enjoying the summer school, again and again.

Thanks to Luzia for extraordanary engagement and powerful support, Serban for making it possible to get such great moments in life, Pic for a huge ammount of hidden support and the great Laura for guiding the entusiastic boys day by day and translation work. Thanks also to Ioana for spending so much hours of private time to guide and help. And thanks to Rodica and Familiafeliz to sponsor this workshop.

And thanks to my private social network which is supporting me in delivering these workshops without fear and economical tension, like Antje & Corinna, Eddy & Angela, Cecile, Clara, Oana, Anita, Sorina, Francesc and Raquel. All these are my big heros of social entrepreneurship and a big light in the dark. Thank you for being part of my life!

For sure, its all about L.O.V.E.

A student excursion of the Martin-LutherUniversity Halle – Wittenberg to Spain – project Aquaponic – familia feliz (written by Nils Schlechtweg)
09.03. – 16.03.2019

This excursion had the aim to build an aquaponic system, we have already planned and realized it in smaller dimensions at University. Furthermore, our motivation was to learn something about life in the shared community of Casa del Dragon, the way of living and the culture in Spain. All these things were only possible due to the familia feliz, especially Juan Petry. He provided us a temporary home, a garden to realize our project and extend our research approach. Moreover, he showed us what it means to live together in a community and how to think sustainably.
For our stay and for all we were able to learn there we say thank you!

What did we do this week?
Day1: We arrived in Spain and moved in our accommodation.

Day2: We explored Cervera del Maestre, the garden of familia feliz and we made a plan for the next days. This included the building of teams, who were responsible for cooking and doing the dishes. In the afternoon we made a little trip to the beach of Benicarló.

Day3: The whole day we worked on our aquaponic system in the garden. The majority prepared and modified the tank and the water pipes. A small team of students went to a facility store and bought all supplies we needed for our project.

Day4: After breakfast we visited an ancient oil mill. There was a guided tour, which gave us general information about the press and the preservation of olives. Then we went on with the work in the garden. After lunch we visited the castle, the historical city-centre and the beach of Peníscola.

Day5: Before lunch we took care of the power supply, the tank positioning and the swimming platform and we began with the planning of the breeding station. Then we made a trip to Sierra d’Irta, where we had a great view of its special landscape.

Day6: On this day we worked intensively on our system, the breeding station and the electricity based on solar cells. Furthermore, some student groups helped Juan with the realization of a stone oven, the building of a historical line wall and tree cutting.
Cervera del Maestre

Day7: On our last day, we finished our prototype system, got ready for the departure and said goodbye.
We finished every day with a summary in which we discussed the daily achievements and results. Moreover, optional workshops about living in a shared community or “why does a man with wife and children go to Spain to become a farmer” were offered in the evenings.

How did the trip change our perspective?

Apart from that, we learned about the difficult realization of an aquaponic system.

This stay caused a change of mind on a psycho-emotional level.

So, some people changed their nutrition, thought about an environmental friendly life style or decided to learn Spanish.

We look forward to the next stay at familia feliz!