On January 7, we will depart from our Moraga, California campus for a month of off-the-grid living on a sustainable farm near Quito, Ecuador!
Check back soon for updates from our travels.
Just 25 miles from Ecuador’s capital city, Quito, Nahual is easily accessible but is truly a world away. Nahual sits on Palugo Farm, a working organic farm with numerous free-grazing animals, dairy production, and extensive food production. Nahual promotes the importance of organic produce cultivation with a Community Supported Agriculture project that feeds 30 families every week.
Our Homebase ~ Nahual Education Center at Palugo Farm
In addition, residents of Nahual keep bees, produce cheese, wildcraft herbal teas and other plant medicine, create ceramics and functional pottery, and practice sustainable building and living techniques. Nahual supports the local and native economies with employment, job training, education, and community-building activities.
Nahual is an education center whose mission is to “re-enforce the connection between human beings and their environment. This connection allows us to make appropriate decisions about the future and the coming generations, so that we may once again coexist in harmony with our planet earth.” Nahual’s website is included below.
Nahual’s facilities include a 16-person bunkhouse, “el chozon” (a large classroom and attached indoor/outdoor kitchen including wood fire adobe oven), and an ecological bathroom including solar shower and composting toilets.
Immersed in a month of living close to the land, students will explore the connections between people, place, and the natural world in the foothills of the Ecuadorian Andes. Applying permaculture design principles that have evolved largely out of traditional practices, students will learn to grow and harvest their own food, cook their own meals, compost their own waste, use animal products and medicinal plants, felt wool, and build with adobe and other natural materials. Sustainable living and ecological land use will guide our daily interactions with the surroundings while study of the history and culture of people Indigenous to the region forms the basis of our academic inquiry.
This course is design to give students an understanding of the basis of sustainability: Water, Food, Shelter and companionship. Students will experiment with conscious ways of interacting with the ecosystem based on the well-being of the land and on human health. Through the utilization of local materials students will participate projects that bring ancient skills and modern ways together and pursue a positive impact on the earth.