They brainstorm and discuss ideas. They homeschool their children. Every
member takes turn cooking three meals a day and babysitting. They all possess
excellent cooking skills and creativity to turn everything produced by the farm into
tasty and healthy food. They work from 8 am to 5 pm taking care of their farm and
conserve non-GMO seeds and good local seeds. They give away free seeds to
everyone who writes to them or comes to visit their farm.
They started to use their farm as a center of self-reliance and seed collection, as
they are against GMO and the monopoly policy of seeds dictated by transnational
and national agro-corporations. Later in 2015, when there was a drought and their
farm ran out of water supply, Jon and Ek, his business partner, rented another plot
of land of about 60 acres in Phrao district. They use this place to be a center of
learning too. I was fortunate to be accepted to learn from them for thefirst
self-reliant course ever launched at this center together with about 26 people, and
about 20 people for the vegetarian cooking course.
The areas of teaching and learning are simple. The dining and food preparation
area is a hall without walls—made out of wooden stilts and a tiled roof—with a
cementfloor and long wooden low tables so that students can sit on thefloor. The
kitchen is screened with a simple bamboo screen in the back. The kitchen consists
of a charcoal stove and two gas stoves and many pots and pans and utensils. The
area for yoga is just a roof on top of stilts among shady trees. A two-story building
is a separate one with eight shower rooms and eight toilets using the water pumped
from the waterfiltering units. The resident areas are separated for men and women.
It is made of bamboo. It is just a roof on top of stilts with two separate platforms for
sleeping in a mosquito net.
6.6 What I Learned from Punpun............................
During the self-reliant course, Mr. Jon was our main instructor. The course consists
of introductory sessions on Punpun lifestyle and their philosophy; a tour of the
farm; learning how to seed and sow, collect and preserve seeds; learning how to
make compost; learning theory and practice of building a mud house, a water
filtering system, making organic detergent, and EM liquid fertilizer; food and drink
from the farm: bread making, cream cheese, vinegar, kombucha, and yoghurt; and
discussions on health and basic yoga. For the vegetarian cooking course, other staff
members were instructors. The course consists of making organic soy milk drinks,
home-made tofu and food from soybean residues from the tofu making process, and
other international foods made out of the produce of the farm and mushrooms, such
as salads, home-made pastas, and basic tomato sauce.
What I learned from my participatory observation at Punpun:
- Development
A development indicator in the opinion of Punpun members is whether that path
makes it easy for all the society members to fulfill the four basic needs—food,
6.5 Self-Reliance and Sustainability from a Thai Perspective... 97