Ahimsa Camp day 4

Namaste everyone in cyber world,

Today we had an exciting fourth day of camp at Ahimsa Village. Today we worked on survival skills and it was an enlightening experience. The kiddos started off the day discussing a beautiful quote by Chief Seattle about being part of nature and then we sang a song that reminded us of our interdependence with the natural world. This song touched on all the elements and led into a discussion of what is needed to survive alone in the wilderness.
We covered water, food, shelter, and temperature.
First, we dug a hole and created a water sanitation system in this hole.
Second, we worked on building our own individual fires and the kids collected wood, etc.
Afterwards, the kiddos got an excellent lesson from Debbie, a herbalist in Julian Woods. She was kind enough to explore our natural surrondings with us and point out medicial and edible wild foods. We found plenty to of edible foods to prepare with our lunch (including burrdock root, which we had fun digging up).

Lunch was beautiful! We had tomato/basil salad, corn on the cob (roasted on the fire), fire roasted potatoes, fire roasted homemade bread, soup made from our collected wild foods and mushrooms, fresh snap peas from the garden, and rasberry juice.
The food was delicious and the kids were so grateful they even helped to clean up a bit:)

Later on, we took a hike in the woods and found a spot to build temporary emergency shelter. The kids collected fallen logs/sticks/leaves and we made a makeshift tipi of sorts.

We ended the long day with discussion and tasty watermelon.

Thank you everyone who came or was involved, it was quite a day!

I'll leave you with this beautiful quote by one of my favorite activitists, Grace Lee Boggs:

"Fighting on the side of Humanity against the Empire of Money, we need to go beyond Opposition, beyond Rebellion, beyond Resistance, beyond Civic Insurrection. We don't want to be like them. We don't want to become the "political class," to change presidents, switch governments. We want and need to create the Alternative world that is now both possible and necessary. We want and need to exercise power, not take it."

We are the change.
With love,
Dominique