Arriving on the farm

At 5:30 a.m., the bus station in Arba Minch was pitch black except for a few sets of minibus headlights.
I said, "Konso, Konso" to no one in particular and two men pointed toward a blue minibus in the corner of the lot.
30 birr (about $2.50) and a three-hour drive.
As the sun came up, I saw a landscape completely different from the rest of Ethiopia.
This place is lush, green, tropical.
A huge lake in the foreground - the water is red. And towering mountains in the background.
Even the mountains are different. Instead of the granite fists of the north, these are walls of mountains - ranges, linked peak to peak.
A protective wall of mountains on the horizon is a comforting feeling to someone from the Rockies.
I arrived in Konso and vaguely knew that the place I was headed - an organic farm / permaculture training center - is about two miles out of town in the direction of Arba Minch.
Everyone stared but, as always, with an Amharic phrase or two the ice is broken and everyone smiles and tries to help.
Students were walking to school - children in maroon uniforms and high school students in blue.
About a mile out of town, I saw three old men.
"Abet," I said, and reached out my hand. They were excited to shake my hand, making sure each took his turn. I asked if I was headed in the right direction and they pointed just to keep walking. And shook my hand again.
*****

I got a tour of Strawberry Fields from an American guy from Fort Collins who gave off an Alexander Supertramp kind of vibe. He had given himself completely over to his experience at the farm - barefoot, his shoulder-length hair was matted into something like dreadlocks, his uneven beard, the tent he lived in at the top of the hill. Only his wire-rim glasses hinted that he was a recent a fresh college grad from Colorado. When I met him, he was eating a breakfast of lettuce leaves, papaya and beans he harvested from the garden.

The place is a permaculture training center. I got lucky with my timing - a dairy farmer with land near Addis and a farmer from Colombia were there and had a lot to teach.
Permaculture - which is new to me - is based on everything in the garden or on the farm working together as a system. Vegetables are planted in "guilds" or families instead of planting one variety per bed or row. One plant will feed nitrogen to the soil, one will be a ground cover to retain moisture, one will fight pests.
At first, the garden looked like chaos to me. Beds filled with different plants, one on top of the other, mulched with straw. It took an entire day of working in the garden before the light went on and I started to see the order of it.
They build their raised beds with a layer of cardboard on the bottom, then a layer of green material, a layer of compost and a layer of straw. Repeated like a lasagna. The green and the straw decompose to feed the plants and retain water.
Beyond the garden is a seed saving shed. The seeds are saved from everything that is harvested if possible.

Chickens. Rabbits. A "food forest" of papaya, banana, guava and mango trees.
Cotton, beans, coffee planted on the ridge above it all.