http://www.gaiaeducation.org/index.php/en/pbl/sicilia-integra-course-oct16

Floridia, Region of Syracuse, Sicilia

This program feels like a great direction for transforming the mass migration situation into a truly evolutionary step towards integration and win-win for everyone. We’re creating a large demonstration site together on community land that will be a self-funded didactic centre producing high productivity vegetables, fruit and fish, cleansing town water currently polluting the local river system and turning it into vast volumes of biomass and ultimately animal fodder. It will be a model of excellence which can modified and duplicated all over the planet wherever the migration situation is seen as a ‘crisis’, and turning it into an indisputable asset for all.

Already the expressions on the faces of the largely conservative local population, have noticeably changed towards an appreciation of watching local and migrant youth working together to create a beautiful and productive farm on what was wasteland laying idle for many years. More poetically, the site is the original entrance to the town, where the communal laundry basins, where animals once slaked their thirst coming and going from working the fields. Abandoned for decades, these open basins are metamorphosing into gardens and fish ponds as the newcomers honour the past at the same time as they contribute to a fresh and dynamic future.