Tasting the Soil and Mobilizing the Future: Pedagogies of Hope in Timor-Leste’s Permaculture Youth Camps

Tracing

Tracing the connectivities and pathways of permaculture to Timor-Leste through a paratext analysis of East Timor’s first permaculture manual, in addition to conversations with permaculture protagonist and pioneer Ego Lemos illuminates how and with whom permaculture traveled to the young nation (see Stodulka, 2020 for detailed description).

Ego Lemos, who is the co-founder of Timor-Leste’s first permaculture NGO Permakultura Timor Lorosa’e (Permatil), co-author of the guidebook, and initiator of the juventude permakultura movement, directly refers to Mollison and Holmgren in the foreword to the Permaculture Guidebook from East Timor (first edition 2006; second edition 2008), as pedagogical founding figures and sources of inspiration. As a translation and adaption to the East-Timorese context, the guidebook is based on a collaboration between local communities, translocal activists and artists—who have illustrated the guidebook—and transnationally operating NGOs, who have co-funded its production (see Figure 1). After a series of reprints in both the Timorese language Tetum and English, which had a significant impact on Timor-Leste’s educational, political, and social sectors, Permatil co-founded a transnational solidarity network of NGOs and permaculture practitioners titled Permatil Global, in 2018. The launch of the network’s website coincided with the international edition of The Tropical Permaculture Guidebook, which comprises three books in both Tetum and English and carries the subtitle “A Gift from Timor-Leste.” Since then, over 120,000 chapters have been downloaded in 160 countries, and extensive international NGOs have utilized the guidebook for various programs, including sustainable agriculture, livelihoods, climate resilience, and health. The National University of Timor-Leste uses the guidebook for teaching sustainable agriculture, and it was also translated and adapted for Indonesia by the IDEP Foundation, who re-published the guidebook in English and Indonesian, with now over 200,000 chapters downloaded. Since its publication, the guidebook has been used in Sri Lanka, Samoa, Nepal, Australia, The Philippines, Solomon Islands, Uganda, and Haiti because there were no tropical permaculture books available at this scale and nowhere near enough literature available for creating sustainable households and communities as well as environmental restoration, especially in so-called low to middle-income countries (LMIC). The guidebook is written and illustrated in genre and style for indigenous and non-indigenous, urban, rural, and remote communities in tropical and subtropical regions. On Permatil Global website, where the books can be downloaded in return for a donation, the not-for-profit collective articulates its global future vision and aspiration as follows:

We aim to make permaculture tools and knowledge accessible to everyone across the globe, working with people to strengthen food sovereignty, facilitate environmental regeneration, mitigate climate change, and build resilient and sustainable communities everywhere. We acknowledge that this is an ambitious vision, but to create comprehensive and long-lasting change, we need to think big and do not plan to do it alone (Permatil Global website).

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Figure 1.

Second edition of Timor-Leste’s first permaculture guidebook (Permatil, 2008).

Although the first two editions of the guidebook were translations of permaculture knowledge from Australia to the Timorese context, the new guidebooks published 10 years later are conceptualized as gifts from Timor-Leste to the world; hence, no longer an adaption of traveling permaculture knowledge but its self-conscious dissemination. Indeed, only 19 years after Permatil’s foundation as an NGO (1999) and 16 years after Timor-Leste’s independence from Indonesia (2002), the small NGO, which comprises only a handful of permanent employees but dozens of educators and volunteers, managed to become a hub for tropical permaculture in Asia and Oceania. In addition to the transnational connections and networks that Permatil has shaped and the many national and international awards bestowed upon its co-founder, Ego Lemos, the permaculture movement started spreading rapidly across Timor-Leste’s 13 administrative districts. Compared to the first permaculture youth camp in 2008, where 400 youth above 17 participated, the fifth camp 2018 hosted over 1,000 youths over 1 week. Moreover, since 2021, youth camps have been organized quarterly instead of biannually, with participants between 400 and 1,500. In 2024, Permatil will also host an international permayouth camp, hosting over a thousand participants worldwide. Today, permaculture knowledge no longer travels to Timor-Leste to localize it there. Permatil has become a global player in disseminating permaculture knowledge and practice across Asia and the Pacific.

Exploring

Next to tracing, I have explored different contexts in which persons and communities were affected by permaculture. So, in addition to tracing permaculture through paratextual and website analyses, interviews, and FGDs with the movement’s protagonists, children, youth, and local village leaders between 2015 and 2019, I participated in juventude permakultura camps in 2022 that I will attend in more detail in the later sections of this article. Over the years, I also learned from water conservation projects in the Aileu, Manatuto, and Atauro Island districts and from interviewing and conversing with participants. I inquired into how permaculture was perceived from different perspectives. Although there has been a wide range of opinions, permaculture is mainly agreed upon as a collaborative practice of learning together (aprende hamutuk) that works together with our land and communities and not against them.

In addition, with interlocutors, I explored permaculture’s demographic and historical resonance with the Timorese context during consecutive collaborative fieldwork engagements and a series of online FGDs during the COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020. Conversations focused on why permaculture community initiatives have such potential to resonate with the geography, demography, history, and political landscapes of contemporary Timor-Leste. Let me share some of the factors we came up with regarding why permaculture continues resonating significantly in the young nation-state.

Timor-Leste gained independence in 2002 after over four centuries of Portuguese colonialism, 24 years of illegal annexation by Indonesia, and an interim civil administration and peacekeeping mission provided by the United Nations (Sakti, 2017). Today, the young nation is home to an estimated population of 1,400,000 people, with the population continually growing. Two drastic drops in population growth in the late 1970s and the late 1990s marked outbreaks of collective violence, starvation, torture, and killings. These relate to Timor-Leste’s colonial past when the Indonesian military and respective-sponsored militias engaged in strategic and structural atrocities against its population (Sakti, 2013). This is important to consider, as some also describe permaculture education in schools and camps as decolonial learning in opposition to the decade-long domination of Indonesian and Portuguese curricula and language (Jaramillo & Carreon, 2014). Hence, school, campus, and youth camp curricula and pedagogy remain subject to Timor-Leste’s ongoing contestation over its colonial history and imagined future (Da Costa Cabral & Martin-Jones, 2017; Hill, 2007). Apart from disputes on language proficiencies and priorities—as to whether Tetum, the vernacular spoken in and around the capital Dili, Portuguese, or even Indonesian were appropriate languages of education (Ogden, 2017), the prospect of permaculture-based school garden curricula, permaculture youth, and community development initiatives also responds to international investors’ initiatives. These continue targeting Timor-Leste’s various economies, ideas of the land, and the country’s transformation concerning large-scale agricultural undertakings, and everyday consumption patterns.

With a mean age of 17.4 years, Timor-Leste is one of the youngest populations in the Asia Pacific region, with 40% of the total population below the age of 14. If compared with the mean age of Germany (47.1 years) or Singapore (34.6 years), the reasons why the articulation of permaculture as ecotopia and rhetoric of Timor-Leste’s future is so prominent in Permatil’s permaculture guidebooks become more comprehensible. Future-driven public discourse also manifests in visions of nation-building and other entrepreneurial projects within the private and state sectors (Kammen, 2009; Bovensiepen & Meitzner Yoder, 2018). Timor-Leste is a young nation with considerable, yet disputed, oil resources and an entrepreneurial class within the government. Therefore, contemporary features of the national development plans (ten Brinke, 2018) include the planning and development of special economic zones giving tax reductions catering to transnational investors and consumers and the rapid development of infrastructures. However, despite Timor-Leste’s rapidly changing infrastructures and aspirational economic megaprojects, it ranks among the highest in the region for maternal mortality rates and malnutrition. This seems paradoxical because Timor-Leste is a largely agrarian economy with approximately 70% of its population living in rural and often hard-to-reach areas, where—aside from few jobs as civil servants including teachers and administrators—small-scale agriculture, horticulture, forestry, and fishing are primary income-generating activities.

Juxtaposing

In addition to tracing permaculture and exploring its resonance in Timor-Leste, we continue juxtaposing permaculture-based initiatives focusing on community gardening and water conservation with projects implemented by international NGOs and their governmental proxies. We anticipate that these three methodological steps continue opening up anthropological inquiries into a variety of phenomena, such as contrasting the shaping of young persons’ selves, personhoods, and citizenship, issues of planetary health, nutrition, and well-being, or ways of (un-)learning and contesting normative gender roles in customary socialites. Although this comparative ethnographic perspective remains the broader context of this ongoing research collaboration with activists, artists, youth, teachers, and local administrators, this article focuses on how embedded modes of permaculture are taught and learned in youth camps. The subsequent sections aim to illustrate how the youth movement merges locally rooted environmental knowledge with permaculture’s ethos by amplifying the role of sensing and feeling as agricultural skills. Such sensory and affective dimensions of learning became particularly apparent when juxtaposed with more conventional forms of skilling and learning in comparably short-term, bureaucracy-driven, and capital-intensive initiatives that promote and aspire to social, cultural, and ecological sustainability.

Permaculture Pathways and Affective Scholarship

As we drove up to one of the quarterly organized traveling permaculture youth camps in Labubu, Manatuto, a rough 4-hour ride from the capital Dili in a four-wheel drive pick-up, Ego Lemos, key interlocutor, and research partner, stressed:

“People lost faith and trust in the government to solve their problems. The whole country, the government, and the communities got used to being helped by someone instead of helping themselves. The whole country has been made dependent upon international aid. Almost every project is titled ba futuru (‘for/toward the future’), yet our children will have none if we continue like this. The government spends millions of dollars to create monuments like this one all across the country.”

He points to a grayish concrete structure with a dried-up faucet at the side of the road (see Figure 2).

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Figure 2.

“Monument”: Dry faucet.

“We call them monuments because they have no other function than to remind us of another failed megaproject,” he then honks at a passing cross-country motorcycle—the first that passes us in 2 hours on our bumpy ride on the washed-out dirt road up and down the hills spreading into the dried-up and dusty countryside (Figure 3).

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Figure 3.

The hills of Manatuto and Aileu districts in the dry “hunger” season.

Critical perspectives on hegemonic collations of international aid organizations and governmental departments were common among researchers and activists. Since Permatil itself also collaborates with the Department of Youth and Sports, respective district administrations and village leaders, their transnational branch Permatil Global, the French and Japanese Embassies to Timor-Leste, and a handful of small international organizations, the critique is not directed at relatively common collaborations of the NGO–government nexus per se. Activists and government advisors are concerned with the estimate that most collaborations are based on overly Eurocentric postcolonial assumptions and mindsets and do not integrate local knowledge or decolonial perspectives into their project-driven agendas. East Timorese permaculture practitioners regard such practices as neocolonial undertakings that create more economic dependencies than sustainable knowledge among targeted vulnerable communities. When juxtaposing the dried-up faucets, ruptured and demolished concrete water channels at the side of gravel roads, built, abandoned, and never used airports, segments of asphalted highways on steep mountain slopes that turn into raging water streams in the rainy season, and parched residues of deserted monoculture fields with slowly recovering water sources, trees, and community gardens resulting from permaculture initiatives, I was reminded of the limits of disembodied understanding and plotting from a distance (Figure 4).

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Figure 4.

Pig and tent.

Although this article is not interested in criticizing well-intended (non-)governmental policy and practice from the safe distance of academic writing, I nevertheless intend to underline the significance of in-situ fieldwork and co-habitation in both ethnographic knowledge construction and (non-)governmental project planning and implementation. I am aware of colonialist notions, ethical conundrums, the murky business of knowledge extractivism, and the privilege that comes with fieldwork (Bexley & Nygaard-Christensen, 2017; Stodulka, 2021). However, this potentially colonialist minefield can be a powerful source of mutual learning and understanding if navigated with an action-oriented, long-term, and group-based collaborative ethos and practice. In addition, critically reflecting on the researcher’s positionality and bias regarding affective and moral projection is vital to both anthropological and (non-)governmental knowledge construction and implementation.

Expanding on what has been dubbed “affective scholarship” (Stodulka et al., 2019), I try to take the embodied, sensorial, and emotional dimensions of fieldwork encounters with persons, animals, and environments seriously as ethnographic data. For me, there is no other way of grasping a phenomenon intellectually if not immersing into the lifeworlds I intend to learn with. Affective scholarship systematically explores ethnographers’ relational engagements with interlocutors, the practices studied, and the things and places encountered. It compels the researcher to pay due methodological attention to affects and emotion, document them during fieldwork, and consistently use them as ethnographic data during analysis and writing. Affective scholarship also recognizes the affective force that emerges from the diverse encounters between humans and humans and the nonhuman (Smith & Tucker, 2015). This does not only count for social interactionist research, as posthumanist scholars have reminded us (Ingold, 2000). In highlighting senses as significant generators of affect, I find Low’s (2023) approach helpful, accentuating that sensory phenomena can best be studied through narrative analysis and embodied sensory awareness. Extending affective scholarship through a methodological focus on sensory learning, I have concentrated on documenting both affective and sensory experiences during fieldwork in previously established emotion diaries (Stodulka et al., 2018) (Figure 5).

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Figure 5.

Tent and emotion diary.

Herein, I have aimed to describe the permayouth camp’s atmosphere and integrated a focus on my own and other’s descriptions of tactile, olfactory, and tasting experiences while learning permaculture practice. In order to grasp visual and auditory impressions, I have taken photographs, audio-recorded omnipresent songs, and joking oratories during work at the community gardens, which we later discussed and laughed about together. Ego Lemos, the many at least trilingual permaculture educators, and James Palmer (the other “malae” or foreigner among the 400 participants), an overseas volunteer and alternative community development scholar working at Permatil at the time, were tremendously helpful in translating Tetum language context that I often lacked into English or Indonesian.

Camp Design

After arriving at the campsite the afternoon before the official opening ceremony the following day, I set up my tent on a dried-up lawn assigned to male participants. The large lot was located right next to the diesel generator (which should keep me up many hours after dark for the following seven nights) and between the kitchen, the eating and learning area, and the washing and toilet facilities. The latter were all made of local bamboo and thatched roofs; no other materials were used (Figure 6).

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Figure 6.

Overview of the village, tents of male participants in the background.

The opening ceremony the next day was held near the ancestral tree of the village when the village elders and youth performed welcome rituals for Permatil, the national minister of youth and sports, and the Japanese and French ambassadors to Timor-Leste and their entourages through dance, song, and customary speech (Figure 7).

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Figure 7.

Welcome banner and preparing the welcome ritual.

After the honorary guests were welcomed, they were invited to the ancestral tree to sit and chew betelnut leaves with the male village elders. The village residents and the participants, mostly from neighboring villages and subdistricts and sometimes walked for many hours to participate in the youth camp, proceeded to the football field, where the co-organizers, local and district chiefs, ministers, and ambassadors held speeches. During the following nights, famous artists who drove up from Dili and back gave concerts and invited participants to sing along to popular songs previously known to us only via social media (Figure 8).

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Figure 8.

Opening ceremony at the bamboo stage, shelter for honorary guests on the left.

Where learning, working, and eating together was of primary concern during the hot days, dance, karaoke, speeches, and jokes at the bamboo stage filled the cold evenings. Residents and guests cheered for national celebrities, such as Mana Cidalia Goncalves, Maun Izo Pereira, and also Ego Lemos, prominent volunteers and educators of the permaculture youth movement. The latter three also wrote and composed the juventude permakultura hymn. This uplifting march-like song was played loudly over the stage speakers every morning at 7 a.m. to invite the participants and learners for breakfast at the long bamboo tables:

Take care of nature/Take care of each other/Take care of the future of our land/Permaculture Youth/Permaculture Youth/Together we learn/For our environment/Together we learn/Long live Timor-Leste.

Tasting as Skilling

After 5 days of learning how to look for adequate lots of soil and building soon-to-be fertile community gardens, the participants of the learning group titled “terraced gardens” (the other two groups were “community school gardens and nutrition” and “water conservation”) went for their final check as to whether the knowledge taught “from heart to heart” in open air classes under two trees and through humorous hands-on sessions had already seeped in. Today’s task was to taste the dry earth and thus assess its pH value via our taste buds on the tongue (Figure 9).

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Figure 9.

Learning together under trees on bamboo constructions, kitchen and tents in the back.

Before digging the soil and building more terraces as community gardens and protection from mudslides at the steep hills, Amanu, a volunteer and educator, asked the 20 participants of the group to taste the soil first in order to check whether the following tasks of digging, mulching, and planting seeds would stand a chance to create future fertile gardens. Since no one volunteered, Amanu approached me, took me by the arm, and asked me to taste the soil. I had failed the days before, so the scene for failure, slapstick, and gentle mocking would be set. I played my part—and got it wrong again. By contrast, most young women and men tasted, touched, and sensed the soil right. It was “too gravely,” “too sour,” and looked “too gray,” so we had to look for another lot, some 30 m uphill, where it felt, tasted, and looked “just right.” From a sensory perspective, participants narrated “just right” as a composition of the soil’s texture, assessed visually and by a sense of touch and taste.

Three hours later, after the whole group gouged out two terraces, which included digging, measuring, and mulching the beet with dry weeds, we sat under the only remaining shade-giving tree to take a break. Amanu joked about how slow we were but praised us for how promising our efforts were if we kept practicing and implementing the learned skills of looking at, touching, and tasting the dry earth once we returned to our home communities. As long as we continued collecting soil from different lots in used and transparent plastic water bottles and kept learning to compare them in terms of color, grades of sourness, and granular composition, “no one will ever have to be hungry again.” He then closed his speech with a short yet fervent reminder that stuck with me: “And remember, your head is in Timor-Leste, your heart is in Timor-Leste, but your stomach is in Vietnam!” (Figure 10).

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Figure 10.

Learning together: Tasting the soil and raising eco-political awareness while building terraced gardens.

When a young high school teacher from the district capital asked, “What is wrong with Vietnam?” Amanu explained that “nothing, of course, but even if ‘we’ tried our hardest to finally become independent from Portugal, Indonesia, and international companies, we will never really be, if our food is not secured, if we cannot provide for ourselves! If our stomachs cannot be filled with healthy food! Remember that!”

Rooting Pedagogies of Hope

Although staff and volunteer educators never openly drew on Freirean critical pedagogy as a conceptual way of teaching permaculture-based water conservation and gardening techniques to vulnerable communities aside from its sensory practice, its political ethos and rhetoric, when learning together, fundamentally resembled its core values (Freire 1970/2017). In permaculture youth camps, the trained volunteers invited participants to overcome formal schooling arrangements deeply rooted in colonial pedagogy of repetition and reproductive obedience. Through hands-on teaching and learning by using their bodies and senses and inviting learners to follow their example, the educators invested in hope in a non-idealistic but ontological and tangible manner, acting in the world to transform oppressive conditions, expanding possibilities for social and environmental justice through food security and emancipation. One key to achieving a conversational and embodied way of learning from each other is aimed at what Freire (1992) describes as “opening up to the thinking of others” (p. 110). To the ethnographer interested in pedagogies, the way of teaching and learning together through “less talking and more doing” permayouth camp pedagogy reminded of an “invitation to build from change that begins in ourselves—‘ourselves’ in a collective rather than an individualizing sense, since for Freire, as unfinished beings we cannot be without others; a change both in the ways we relate and build knowledge with others instead of about others” (Torres-Olave, 2021, p. 1).

Hope emerged through comprehensive and inclusive language that uses the body and the senses to communicate and describe permaculture principles. Instead of language and concept-heavy pedagogy, educators integrated local procedures of water conservation, gardening, and horticulture into their embodied teaching style, which primarily and ultimately served only one purpose: the pursuit of previously and collectively identified goals of reestablishing food and water security and reviving customary sociality. The poster attached to one of the three central trees (Figure 11), whose shade provided space for outdoor classes, exemplifies permayouth’s aspiration of inclusive communication using a famous proverb, often used in critical pedagogy endeavors, and highlights the focus on collaborative, sensory, and embodied learning. When a community development lecturer provocatively asked Ego Lemos whether he thought farmers would understand the complex language of permaculture guidebooks during his Ramon Magsaysay Award Ceremony in Manila, The Philippines, in November 2023, he answered, “We do not teach with books. The message is simple: grow what you eat, and eat what you grow.”

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Figure 11.

Learning together: “From you I receive, to you I give, together we share, so we live. I see, I forget/I listen, I remember/I do, I understand.”

Such integrated pedagogy that recognizes local knowledges and feeds on translocal permaculture guidelines, invites sensory and embodied intersubjectivity as practical tools for learning together. In addition, hope arises from empirical evidence. Wherever collaborative and consensual permaculture initiatives were applied and pursued longer-term, either as community projects or disaster relief endeavors, formerly dried-up water sources revived, ancestral trees saved from dying, and trees, plants, fish, birds, and insects started returning in their own “slow” pace.

Relating the practice-oriented and embodied ways of learning to theories of pedagogy, permaculture teaching resembled the core themes of Freire’s (1992) Pedagogies of Hope, where he writes that “there is no change without dreams, as there is no dream without hope” (p. 81). We find similar themes of relating hope to praxis in the writing of hooks (2003), where she sees a successful pedagogy of hope built on students’ and teachers’ interactions in an anti-oppressive form that encourages reflexivity, dialog, and criticality.

Permaculture educators in the youth camps demonstrate that hope must be grounded in practice. They encourage an approach to learning that is forward-thinking, posing questions and ideas for the future, but at the same time relates to fundamental issues of the time. Bourn (2021) reminds us that such hopeful approaches have potential limitations regarding scale and influence. Le Grange (2011) notes the dangers of hope becoming merely a political slogan that is easy to advertise and with which few could disagree. He notes further that a pedagogy of hope must be grounded within people’s lives, not part of some corporate or political agenda. To ground permaculture pedagogy and hope for the future in the lives of both participants and host communities, permaculture youth camp coordinators and educators took the concerns of local communities seriously and worked toward jointly defined aims and targets of the 7-day event. After villages who are exposed to ongoing crises and sudden disasters requested Permatil’s assistance through either community projects or permaculture youth camps through village heads, district administrators, or inhabitants who were familiar with Permatil’s work, a Permatil delegation traveled to the area and met with community representatives. Permatil then applied for funding from governmental and non-governmental organizations if the parties agreed to host a youth camp. Depending on the number of participants and the size of the camp, between five and ten Permatil volunteers and educators stayed in the village, where they slept in tents for 1 month and built the above-described bamboo structures with residents (Figure 12).

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Figure 12.

Volunteers preparing the camp together.

The building of the infrastructure was accompanied by conversations on livelihood, education, and the challenges and hardships of living in conditions of crisis and vulnerability. Local hosts accompanied Permatil volunteers to sites of concern, like dried-up wells, withered gardens, or destroyed houses, to jointly work on permaculture-based endeavors and turn places of concern into sites of potential. Because the villages and contexts of crisis were different in each site, the volunteers learned from the communities how they had dealt with similar crises in the past and then jointly worked toward solutions inspired by permaculture practice. Hence, the teaching focus and pedagogy during the youth camps were not based on standardized tools and contents but on the principle of learning together for a future goal. In Labubu, for example, existential issues were at stake. After a mudslide destroyed more than half of the village’s houses in 2021, the district administration ordered the whole village to a distant subdistrict, except the village managed to recover from the disaster on their terms and revive the land and customary sociality. This would have meant losing ancestral trees, wells, houses, and spirits that have guarded the community for centuries. Where there was desperation before the collaboration with permayouth, hope for renewed soils and water sources and revived customary sociality emerged. Hope was not prescribed as a political trajectory but sustained through shared practice and concern resulting from long-term conversation, empathetic listening, collaboration when preparing for the 1-week youth camp, and a teaching style during the permayouth camp manifesting in mutual recognition, sensory skilling, and embodied learning.