Prologue: 2007

Opok Farm first appeared on my horizon 1 year ago, and then zapped into certainty as a "rest of my life" kind of project sometime last February. Some of you followed that process as I blogged about it at http://www.onarchive.net/user/u6 18296607/news/18/ Since then it's been an exciting, stimulating, frustrating, frightening, disappointing, inspiring and encouraging experience, all rolled into one...

2007 was the first year that the resettlement process began to take hold in Northern Uganda. My husband-to-be Norbert was itching to start farming again, and I had a vision for what kinds of good we could do with the 2600 hectare blank slate of land his family owns. I had sold some property I used to own in Europe in 2006, which has been the source of funds used to re-open and plant 65 acres of Opok Farm land so far. (See the paragraph on fundraising in the "Starting points" section below for details about funds raised for Opok Farm through lifeinafrica.com in 2007).

In addition to breaking ground at Opok Farm, we spent most of 2007 thinking through what the first logical steps need to be in the process of enabling the residential learning community for vulnerable children and youth that we hope to eventually form at the farm. Mixing the agricultural investment needs, exciting community building ideas and the local reality of Northern Uganda's children into a solid conceptual foundation is a process that's still ongoing, but we've got a project map coming together that feels comfortable

Some very intelligent friends and contacts have played an invaluable role in the planning and batting around ideas process so far, and a number of international visits to the farm (to participate in community building and learning activities) are already being planned. The outpouring of support and encouragement from people we don't even know has been very, very encouraging. I’d like to personally thank YOU for being a part of it.

Project Map: 2008 and beyond

As of right now, the following is a summary of the milestones we’re aiming to achieve over between now and 2010. It's an evolving list. As indicated, wheels are already in motion for some of what needs to happen this year:

2008

• Development of a short-medium term agricultural plan (consultants deployed yesterday!)
• Funding and construction of basic retreat center infrastructure ($3,050 of $10,000 already raised)
• Continued study & review of healing and educational approaches, community models, farming techniques and the locally evolving status of dysfunctionally vulnerable children in the resettlement process (Norbert and Christina leave to Thailand to experience an Asoke community in February).

2009

• Launch of a school-holiday retreat series for vulnerable children and youth
• Identification among retreat participants of dysfunctionally vulnerable children and youth (including households of children) in need of what the Opok Farms Village community & school can offer as a temporary or permanent home.
• Establishment of the Opok Farms Village school following required Ugandan Ministry of Education legal procedures.

2010

• invite selected youth/families to build homes at the farm and enroll in the school.

Starting points: 2008

Norbert and I know that the right paths to follow between the milestones we've set out will not always be easy to find. We also know that one of our greatest assets as we set out to follow this dream is the strong network of contacts and supporters that you’ve become a part of. The ideas that have been shared with us over the past 6 months of dialoguing online have profoundly shaped our planning. Some of the key issues that we've been grappling with are summarized below, to give you some insights on what's brought us to where we are starting from this year.

Agricultural Investment

During this first season, we’ve learned a lot about farming and also a lot about the nature of the challenges and uncertainties particular to the context of post-war resettlement. With that experience under our belt and a truly terrible harvest to show for it, we’ve now called in some professional advisors. Yesterday morning, a long time friend of mine who is an agronomist with very interesting community building experience, and his colleague who is the Chairman of the National Organic Movement of Uganda departed with Norbert to conduct a 2 week appraisal of agricultural planning opportunities at opok Farm. The appraisal will synthesize what we’ve learned with what they know and where we hope to go, to allow us to differentiate between various options and serve as a baseline for planning the next 2 years. We’re excited to see what this report brings, and will share it with you when we’ve received it later this month.

Community Investment

Our intent is to eventually allocate at least 50% of whatever land we can manage to re-open by 2010, along with a (yet to be determined) amount of undeveloped land to the Opok Farm school community, which we are calling the Opok Farms Village project. This year, in parallel to re-opening as much land as we can and farming what we’ve already opened, we are also actively planning for the construction of basic lodging infrastructure to host groups of children, youth and adults to participate in community peace-building and emotional healing activities planned to launch in 2009. If we’ve done it right, these shared group experiences on the farm will sow the seeds for an intentional and emotionally accepting group of Opok Farm Village residents to start taking physical shape in 2010, for the purpose of learning to work together to achieve community and household self-sufficiency.

Fundraising

$1,350 has been raised to date toward a $10,000 basic community infrastructure budget online at http://givemeaning.com/project/opokfarms. Another $1,700 was also raised through lifeinafrica.com for the agricultural investment in 2007, however, for the sake of greater clarity and transparency of funds raised from global supporters, we have decided to reallocate the monies raised through lifeinafrica.com in 2007 from the agricultural investment budget to the community investment budget. (I’d hoped to have that reflected at givemeaning.com before posting this, but am still waiting on a response to some help I need from the givemeaning folks before proceeding). With the $1700 raised in 2007 added to the amount raised at http://givemeaning.com/project/o pokfarms, we’ve already raised $3,050 toward building the infrastructure that can enable community building activities to begin.

Societal Impact

After absorbing the SWAY-Uganda report findings (which I wrote about in the last update of 2007), I am increasingly inclined to alter the language that describes our target group for the Opok Farms Village project. To date, we've been talking about "child-headed households" knowing that we definitely want to offer an educational community environment where families of orphans can live and learn together. After hearing what the SWAY team had to say about the need for more personalized ways of dealing with post-war trauma, I really feel what we should be after is helping those children in the region (including, but not limited to child-headed households) who really need the emotional and educational support the Opok Farms Village environment can offer.

Human Development Impact

In my view, the learning-by-doing community education models, emotional healing techniques and deep community building ideas we've been exploring in 2007 (and will continue to study indepth this year) indeed offer a tremendous potential impact for the region's dysfunctionally vulnerable youth and children – ie, those who aren't making it in Northern Uganda’s post-war society, especially due to debilitating personal challenges in dealing with emotional trauma. So while we will definitely include child-headed households in the search for retreat participants and eventual village residents, I'd also like Opok Farm to represent an emotionally safe environment for the former child soldier who feels alienated from his own pre-war community he was once forced to help destroy, the child mother who hasn't recovered emotionally from a rape experience, or the young person who suffers from feeling haunted by spirits for any other reason and needs a new sense of balance as someone who belongs in the world.

Model Development

We’re still working through the mental details of how a mix of long-term (permanent) residents and transitional (student) residents will work. Ideally, we will see the Opok Farms Village community school producing a strong network of alumni with a continuing stake in the school, who are also able and prepared to branch out and rejoin traditional society as productive participants in adding value to their own family land and social structures. Getting that mix right is going to require further research this year – Next month, Norbert and I will be traveling to Thailand to live for 2 weeks in one of the Asoke communities that our friend Linda Nowakowski has been telling us about . Asoke is a network of sufficiency communities founded on Buddhist economic principles, and we think the model will offer us some concrete insights how a sufficiency community based on shared values can work.

Environmental Impact

This is by far the most frustrated part of the vision we had originally imagined for Opok Farm. In the context of mass resettlement of the displaced camp population, all sorts of land issues are very unclear to people - it's kind of a free for all. We are finding it extremely difficult to deal with people engaging in unlawful activities (like burning forest canopy for charcoal) and many small farmers coming to stake their claim in what they understand as empty wilderness. Overwhelmed at the speed with which the Opok forest is being cut down, we remain at a loss as to how to effectively protect the land's natural environment. Such a shame.

As you can see, this project is still very much under development and in need of thinkers - please continue to dialogue with us at http://www.ned.com/group/opokfar ms/news/11/. Your views, insights and ideas on any of the above issues would be welcome in the mix. All the best to you all for a great 2008!