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common ground

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am Nation A short film by Sara Schaumburg

Peggy Reents is a graduate of the University of Colorado at Boulder. She is a former CIEE-Khon Kaen student and co-founder of the Educational Network for Global and Grassroots Exchange (ENGAGE). Peggy has been living in Thailand since 2001. She writes on behalf of Pun Pun, the sustainable seed-saving and organic farming community she co-founded near Chiang Mai, Thailand. Among the activities offered at Pun Pun are workshops on building sustainable earthen homes. To see some of Pun Pun community’s work and to learn more about earthen building, please visit http://www.punpunthailand.org.

Earth-moving Ideas

By Peggy Reentss

Everyone who comes to live with us takes away something different. Some have contacted us saying that they left their official jobs and went back to their land to create a self-reliant, sustainable life regardless of the difficulties they faced by making such a change. We continually learn from those who come to learn from us. Our goal is to be an experiential learning center striving to try the new ideas brought to us and grow with them.

Rather than operating as a business, we invite people and their friends to attend workshops. In this way they learn skills and are empowered to utilize them. We feel this is important to create a change in society versus just a small shift. A small shift would be using earth instead of resource-destructive concrete and showing it can be nice, but a change is people of all walks of life knowing how to take care of themselves and their families through simple, sustainable means. Coming from an industrial country where we are so out of touch with where our food comes from, how to build a house, grow what we need, it’s exciting, and empowering to re-gain these skills.

So we continue to work person by person and plant by plant because we feel a simpler, easier life is attainable and accessible if we listen and learn. We feel it’s important to fight outside against injustice and to sustain human rights in our communities while also sustaining ourselves inside by being self-reliant and continuing to create an alternative. An alternative that’s possible.

We believe self-reliance is the ability to supply our four basic needs ourselves. We grow our own food and build our own homes from readily available, sustainable materials. We grow and make herbal medicines, seeking out indigenous and rare varieties to preserve and propagate.

For us self-reliance does not mean only relying on ones self. It also means relying on others by creating communities that are self-reliant and sustainable. It’s the same as family structures, one person does not have to play every role all the time but everyone should know how if need be.

Self-reliance is empowerment. Empowerment in knowing you can live a full, content, stimulating life without clocking in and out each day. We could live an isolated, sustainable life, but we believe part of our work must be sharing the opportunity with others. We have to show others how easy it is to live simply, a perspective people are rarely exposed to in our modern culture.

We work to empower people to know they can take control over their lives and create, sustain, and enable a life more liveable, a life that uses our hands, bodies, and minds, our freedoms, and our time to work and live and be with family and friends.

We take participants from all over the world and have recently started a training program specifically for Asian activists, community leaders, and organization representatives. This training is designed for participants to learn and go back to share with their groups/networks in order to expand the movement.