And a ship...
1. Sail: Action-based and holistic treatments
In the Far East holistic treatments have a long tradition, here it’ s a rather new thing, with increasing popularity over the last decades. Here we aim to see the whole picture and treat people rather than symptoms or diseases. Every problem has a multitude of causes and effects and very often, especially in the therapeutic sector a simple treatment of the symptoms is not enough by far. Let’ s take an example: Usually we associate feelings like shame, anxiety, anger or maybe sadness and a sense of inferiority with our deficits. But these tend to decrease our ability to learn. If we go on treating nothing but the problem, the process will potentially be slow, trying and frustrating. But what if we’d be able to exchange the negative connected feelings through positive ones? The patients won’ t only feel better, they will also learn much better. This is just one example of how we can profit from holistic therapies.
Concerning the action- based therapy, we keep it brief by just making a short gedankenexperiment. Imagine you sit at your desk, thick book in front of you reading about composting, N-C-ratios and stuff like that. Now imagine, you are out in a garden actually building a compost heap, while someone is explaining this and that. In which situation do you believe you learn better? See? This is pretty much the same for all of us.
2. Sail & 3. Sail: Therapy- Vacations and Leisure Facilities
Many parents of kids with special needs know the following problem: there are only very few things they can do in their free time. Even in a city like Berlin, the routine is dominated by therapies, while other kids maybe learn an instrument or do pottery or the like. On the countryside you are happy if you have at least a therapist.
Well, we want to change that a bit. For everyone who lives in the vicinity we will have offers on a weekly base. Everyone who comes from farther away, can spend their vacations with us and visit the daily sessions during the stay. If you are asking yourself now: „So what? Therapy or amusement?“ We do both in one!
All the activities will take place in groups, as is usual with most children activities for different reasons. But in therapies we tend to prefer a one to one situation instead for better being to able to attend to our patients needs. But as stated, we don’t only do therapy but amusement as well. Learning in groups is usually much more fun, the kids can make friends, they experience being normal, that others have similar problems, too and they can learn from each other.
That positive atmosphere, the influences of spending time in nature and the contact to the animals are all aspects that also support our success.
Possible activities during the courses run from daily tasks like feeding the animals to special events like building bird houses you can take home. Just to get a general idea.
Since Toni is a speech therapist, the main focus will be language at first, but we’ll actively search for other therapists to join the crew.
By the way, so far I was only talking about therapies for kids and they will probably make up the majority. But there’ s gonna be weeks especially for adults, too. No matter, if you have a problem with your voice, if you stutter or if you have a neurological problem, anyone can profit from our concept.
4. Sail: Hands-on-farm
We’ d like to share our projects and ideas with you and also realize them together with you. Beginning with daily tasks like feeding the stock and ending with one-time-projects like digging a pond maybe. We chose those kinds of lifes not only for moral reasons, but also because we find the work to be rather fulfilling. Of course, not everyone else is ready to give everything up, to lead a life like this. But at our farm, you can break out of your routine for a week or so to do something different, something fun and meaningful. There are loads of possibilities. Always something to experience. Always something to learn. On our hands-on-farm you are welcome to join in on all of it.
5. Sail: Regional and healthy food
Climate and environment protection are very important to us. That’ s one of the main reasons, we like permaculture that much. To build a farm following natures example. Sounds quite romantic even, doesn’t it? We don’t use chemicals, neither for fertilization nor for pest control. Instead we use natural interrelations such as companion planting or predators and several more. So our products ought to be much healthier than what you can usually buy in a supermarket. By selling only via farm store and community supported agriculture our products stay regional. Short transports – small ecological footprint.
6. Sail: Ethical husbandry
In permaculture, if you want to introduce a new element to your system, you will do an input-output-analysis beforehand. For explanation: An element could be a plant, an animal or even something like a building or a pond. The input analysis is rather easy, it contains everything you have to invest once in the beginning, but even more important continuously over time. If you take a plant for a simple example you start by buying (or harvesting) the seeds, then think about planting, transplanting maybe, weeding, watering, fertilizing, pruning, … until you get to the harvest. You don’t have to do all these things for every plant, it’s just to get a general idea. The output-analysis is much more versatile. What comes to mind first is the products like fruits, milk, eggs or feathers to name some. But would you have thought about wind, sun or noise protection, when planting a sea buckthorn? Or would you have taken into account the warmth animals are giving when planning where to put the stables? And what about activities like the scratching of the chickens? Using that analysis, we try to connect our elements in way that is beneficial for each one. For instance we use the chickens to boost our compost production. The process is much faster with the chickens scratching and picking they do. They eat potential vermin and seeds of weeds and their dung adds to the fertility of the compost.
To cut a long story short: We are thinking about the needs of our future farm mates long before they actually get there, to guarantee an ethical husbandry, from which not only the animals can profit, but we can, too.
7. Sail: Shoemakers shop and repair café
The shoemakers shop will be paired with the repair café. Oskar, being a shoemaker, will first offer mainly shoe repairings and simple saddler works. Aiming to build measured shoes at some point again. This will actually be the first part of the house of handcrafts (s.b.). The repair café is modelled after self-help-workshops, but it is kind of a platform for the house of handcraft as well. Here our masters can work and repair the stuff you bring on the way.
8. Sail: House of handcraft
The house of handcraft is a brainchild of Oskar. It aims to build an intergenerational network of different handcrafts. Including some professions that would not classically be counted as handcrafts, such as bakers and doctors maybe. The idea is similar to what we do in permaculture. We try to build a network where everyone can profit from each other, according to the principle: „I offer, what I can do and you offer, what you can do.“
The goal of sustainability is also present here. We want to turn away from industrialized products as much as we can and create hand-made bread, shoes and other things instead.
Coming to the intergenerational part. Once age was associated with wisdom, nowadays words like senility come to mind more easily. No wonder, if we look at todays homes for elderly people or nursing homes more closely. But there is so much knowledge buried there. We intend to dig that out. Giving back to the seniors some of the meaning they used to have in society. We want to learn from the old masters and pass the knowledge on. The seniors also benefit greatly from the project. They stay fitter, both physically and cognitively, because body and mind are constantly used. Plus, having to do something meaningful and feeling needed has a great effect on the psychological health.
From that coalition between old knowledge and new techniques we expect to achieve a very high quality in the generated products. Those works of art will be distributed in the region as well, using maybe the farm shop, the community based agricultureor markets.