The Capital Campaign has been launched, and Compassion Fruit Society has made an official offer to the owner to purchase the land…so what (you may ask) exactly is this land that I repeatedly refer to in these pages? It’s a good question, and one that I will attempt to answer herein. However, if you do have any more questions after reading below please do not hesitate to send them through and I will be more than happy to answer them for you.

“The Land” (as it has come to be known) is a 135 acre property for sale in Guatemala, and the proposed location for the Seres College and the Project Somos Children’s Village. Actually, ‘proposed’ is an adjective that doesn’t really do to justice to the potential of this property. Perhaps it would be better if I were to say the ideal location, or the location that first inspired the collaboration between Seres and Somos that we have today…dare I say it is the perfect location for our vision? It certainly feels like it for us, and over the days that we visited the site and considered all of the different opportunities that it offered for the projects, our enthusiasm continued to grow.

For those of you that have recently started following Project Seres, I will give you a quick recap. We (Project Seres) are building a centre for climate change education and sustainable development in Guatemala which will serve vulnerable and at-risk communities throughout Central America. This will be a hands-on learning centre, a working example of sustainable living, and a place where poor communities can come to learn tools and knowledge that will allow them to improve their lives in ways that are environmentally sustainable and ecologically sound.

Our partner project, Project Somos, is building an eco-sustainable village for orphaned and abandoned children in Guatemala. The village will be a community where every child has a safe and nurturing home, a loving and supportive family, and a happy and healthy future – essential elements in childhood that are badly needed in Guatemala.

While working autonomously, the two projects will collaborate and share resources, thoughts, technologies, ideas and land – working on the synergy between us to create the best outcome. It is a vision that grows stronger every day, more so now that we have found a site on which we can build our dreams and turn them into a tangible reality. I hope that I can share some of our enthusiasm with you and begin to paint a picture of our collaboration in the details, images and video of the land below…enjoy!

Lower Site shed

The Facts

Spring - Lower SIte

The First Time

My first visit to the land was at the request of my friends in Project Somos, who had found a potential site for their Children’s Village and had asked me to come along and cast my ‘engineer’s eye’ over a few aspects of the property. At that time, I hadn’t even started thinking about sites for the Seres College, and as I bounced along in the back of the mini-van with bucket, tape measure, stop watch, note pad and various other items of paraphernalia that engineers like to drag along for a site inspection, my mind was far from thoughts of future homes for Project Seres and potential collaborations.

We arrived first at the Upper Site, and as Heather started to show me around and talk me through her visions of the Children’s Village I could picture it forming up in my mind’s eye. Her enthusiasm contagious, I too started dreaming up all the opportunities for the Somos Children’s Village, and could appreciate the added value that the site brought to the project.

After wandering around the Upper Site and poking our noses into all the buildings, we climbed into the back of the pickup truck for the bumpy trip down to the Lower Site. As we bounced along down the rather steep track, I noticed that we were driving underneath large Callistemon (or Bottlebrush) shrubs – a tree that is primarily endemic to Australia, and certainly not one I expected to find in Guatemala. Passing underneath the glorious red flowers gave me a strange sense that I was actually back at home, on a farm somewhere in rural NSW. We drove down past the cleared terraces, pulling up alongside the shed and near the spring that Greg wanted me to help him assess for its micro-hydro potential. Until this point, I had remained fairly impassive – appreciating the property from a professional point of view, but not getting emotionally attached. And then I saw the spring. Wow. It is incredible, and without doubt the most striking feature on the site. The water issues forth from under the ground, flowing up into a series of pools large enough for swimming, hugged close by lush greenery on all sides – like an oasis in the surrounding landscape. 2” black polypipe directs a portion of the flow down into the nearby dam (or lake, as my Canadian friends call it), and the remaining water flows on into the River Pixcaya, which forms the border for the Lower Site. It was as we were admiring the incredible beauty of this area that Heather first started to talk about her dreams to eventually have an environmental education centre here for Guatemalan school children…something they had always envisioned as part of the project but a long way down the track. And, curiously enough, at this point our discussions turned to Project Seres, and the potential that the Lower Site had to be the location for the educational centre, or Seres College (and the rest is history).

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Spring and pools

Callistemon (Bottle Brush)

It was at this point that I started to see the site in a whole different light, and that I allowed myself to start dreaming of possibilities – and it was an interesting mix of emotions that were awakened. The layout of the site has exciting potential, with room for permaculture, aquaponics, agro-forestry, appropriate technology…all of the methods and techniques that we want to showcase through the project. At the same time, the land here does need to be healed – primarily the Rio Pixcaya which is incredibly polluted due to the activities of communities upstream, and re-vegetation of the surrounding forest with native species. And of course, the spring – an incredible natural resource that needs to be protected and nurtured so that we can share it with generations to come…

Hopefully the pictures speak for themselves. Also, you can watch a short video made by Project Somos (it has a focus on the Children’s Village) that shows the Upper and Lower Sites by clicking here.

Is It Too Much?

It is fairly obvious that the Upper Site and Lower Site are well suited to the intentions of Project Somos and Project Seres. However one of the questions that we get from people is what of the remaining land? How do the Conference Centre and Guest House and remaining 100-plus acres of land fit into the plans for these projects? Isn’t it all too much? Well, the short answer is no, and the reasoning behind this is the financial strategy of the projects. While we are not-for-profit projects, we are not non-profit projects, and we do not want to be forever going back to our supporters with our hands out asking for more donations to keep operations running. Financial sustainability is one of the key goals for the projects, and our strategy for achieving this is a combination of social enterprise and international community outreach.

The additional land on the property is the perfect opportunity to pursue a social enterprise venture – namely through growing crops like coffee and/or cacao that can be exported from Guatemala. This type of venture would benefit not only the local community with additional job and business opportunities, but would also provide a source of income stream for the projects to support their philanthropic activities.

The presence of the existing buildings on the property is an additional boon, that will help us to not only further our education and outreach objectives but also provide another source of income. The educational and outreach components of the work that we do is not limited to just the local community, and we will be offering opportunities for participants from the international community to join us for workshops, retreats and voluntourism. The Conference Centre and Guest House provide us with fantastic facilities from which to run these programs, and will also allow us to kick-start these programs much earlier than originally anticipated.

Bottle brushes and fig trees on the drive down to the lower land

Lower Site

What Next?

As I mentioned at the start of this blog, we have launched the Capital Campaign to raise money to purchase the land. This will be no easy task, but we know that we can do it – must do it! This is the next key milestone that we need in order to move forward. Any help that we receive is greatly appreciated. So if you would like to donate, suggest people we should talk to, come along and visit one of our information events, help with fundraising….you name it, we want to hear it. Please email us at info@projectseres.org with the Capital Campaign in the title, and I will get back to you asap.

Until then,

Corrina

NOTE: Video courtesy of our friends in Project Somos