Connecting with the community
This week we have been starting to reach out to the local foreign community, both personally and on social media. As home butchers, punk rockers and fairly old farts we don't have that much overlap with many of the younger folks who are mostly into yoga, spiritual stuff and vegetarian food. But everybody loves to get together on markets, and everybody is affected by the overwhelm of general dystopia combined with trying to build something better in a foreign country. People do want to build some form of community.
So just by going out there and meeting people (involving food always helps to make things more enjoyable!) a lot of things are happening already. We are eating a lot of cake. We gave away quite a few of the many trees we left to sprout over winter. Hope people care for them and plant them out! We also were gifted seeds, plants and good advice. I met someone again who had kept Harold, a long-forgotten sourdough I once made, alive over 4 years - it brought me to tears to get some of that fucker back and bake good bread again! A solar oven, built during an earlier project attempt, might resurface at some time and a better follow-up model be built.
Why I now believe wholeheartedly that even the tiniest push towards better is always worth it, no matter how weak it seems to be? All this grows on seeds that were planted in the past, where somebody went to some effort to create a world with more kindness and more diversity. A welding workshop for girls I attended when I was 12, organized by some feminist youth worker group in my city. A non-religious temporary tea temple on a beach and the most simple spirituality being a freely offered cup. Human decency in places where I was told it couldn't exist. Seeing someone daring to be different, and taking courage from that. Making a sourdough, and giving it away to someone. Someone choosing to run a decidedly hopeful Lemmy instance.
Whatever you can do, even if its immediate impact seems too small to matter, will matter. Maybe it takes 40 years to reach a noticable size, but it's never lost.
Next steps: I expect a lot more cake in the next weeks, and have invited a few people to discuss cooperative ideas.
Now we need to take care of the practical things for the market. We didn't like the mega-corporation attitude of the toilet rental, so we decided to be cheeky and will set up compost toilets on top of IBCs. If somebody wants to cause a stink because some law let them bring it on. We are also planning a pre-party to clean the space and build the toilets.