From June 13th to 16th Szatyor Association hosted the second study visit of the Value of Waste project, focused on organic waste.
Participants from Slovenia, Croatia and Hungary were welcomed in a rural community house, founded 6 years ago, after a long history of community work in Budapest. They heard about the history of the place, on going projects and goals of this amazing association. The first day was dedicated to learning more about the project and connecting with other participants.
On the second day, participants got the opportunity to visit the Pusztazamor land field of waste for Budapest city. It was interesting to see how it is organized but depressing to see how much waste one city can produce. It was also surprising and disturbing to see the huge population or storks living there.
We then headed to Saint Francis Garden and Kindergarden project, an amazing garden for growing food and children! Kids are outside most of the day, they play with natural materials, eat organic food, everything they produce is compostable, even toilets. They have 5 employees for 20 children from the village, and lot of animals on the farm. They also produce veggies for green baskets every week. They cooked us an amazing vegan, gluten free meal just from ingredients from the farm!
We also had Composting and Food Cycle workshops to dive deeper, find solutions, rethink the future and think about how to implement the things we have seen in our Youth Work.
We ended the day with an intercultural evening, presenting food, drinks, dance and songs from our countries.
The third day started in Budapest, visiting two amazing community composting projects. If you're looking for initiatives like this, we suggest Share waste app, and if there are no initiatives near you, maybe you can start them?
Next we visited Wekerle a neighborhood in Budapest that was part of the Garden city movement over 100 years ago. The idea was to make people feel like they live in village - they planted 60.000 trees /16.000 fruit trees/ for 4.000 households that they built back then on 1km2 area! How cool is that!!??
We met an extraordinary woman there - Tracey, originally from Scotland - who runs a plant based restaurant, and vegetable farm, together with group of active members of her community, in transition initiative and cooperative. We learned so much about plant based cooking and how they reduce food waste as a catering business.
We used free time to visit Margaret island on Danube river, and Szimpla Kert art and club squat in Budapest.
The last day was an opportunity to reflect on everything that we experienced throughout this visit and to think about the future.
We are looking forward to seeing each other again in Croatia in September!
