 it looked like bet miller middler came in if bet middler is here that hey that's better for me yeah that's fantastic i would marry milder milder milder milder i thought it was bet middler and i thought my goodness is he still with us i hope so well john is setting down for for this session we will wait just for a couple of minutes just to make sure everyone is in here snow is forming in situations we live in the Netherlands and we have snow since a long long time yep so do i yeah i am enjoying it yes so do i i mean bird then wonderful right yeah just rubbing in the summer much for for setting the tone you can see you can continue because people hear me but i will share my screen through the presentation let's see if people are still coming in the English so maybe just one more minute one more minute okay let's go for one more minute it's almost meditative to to listen to john's guitar play and a monastery sort of you're you're muted yeah i noticed what do you think can we start the meeting or i think we can yeah 45 people in the room 45 people thank you everyone for for joining us and welcome to our fireside chat session with john d lu the founder of ecosystem restoration camps and chris case the founder and ceo of camp mainsprings in Tanzania very lovely to have a year um just some house rules in terms of what we are doing differently than last time is that we would like to engage you more within this session so we would like to um please hold your questions until after chris's presentation because we would like you to raise your hand if you have a question so you are able to ask it in person we'll make sure that we have a little bit more engagement with with you guys and we also um this session will last for one hour but we'll facilitate one hour just to um have time for an open discussion if you feel um free to stay so you can decide on yourself and we will decide what kind of topic we would like to discuss after one hour so um thanks again first i would like to highlight some camp news um this month i would like to highlight camp contour lines um they got a visit from a conservation biologist and together they're working on data collection for their food forest sites so that's a great achievement and they're also experimenting with a value added products from the food forest for example um they're trying out artisanal cacao tropical salsas and kombucha to sell and to sustain their project so i think that's fun to share as well and they are expanding from 12 to 16 villages so they are improving livelihoods of many of the local communities so um great news for them and they're um they even won the permaculture magazine prize um because they had the best project in terms of transforming lives and landscapes so um that's some happy news to share in this uh 2021 um we also are announcing some new camp experiences um obviously covid is still an issue um but we spoke with the camps and they do want to plan it ahead so we we're not sure if it will happen but we decided to announce it it's not officially announced yet it will be after one week or two on our website but we just wanted to give you a heads up that we are trying to make this work um for example kamama adama in portugal is um hosting their first camp ever from the 3rd of april until the 10th and they will allow until 10 to 15 members um and camp americum in uk is planning a series of rewarding short learning experiences and the first one will be in april as well and then camp for soleil in france um the one who was in the fariside chat session in january and they are hosting their first camp ever as well from the 23rd until the 30th so we don't know for sure if it will happen but we are obviously we are very hopeful that we can organize these camps all right and then what we are here for um i'm very grateful that camp mainsprings um become an ecosystem restoration camp i think since 2020 2021 so they are very new to us and we are very proud that they have become part of our movement and um yeah i would like to share a little introduction video of their project um let me see if this will work and otherwise i will go back to okay so i got it here as well a seed can change the world a seed becomes a farm a farm feeds the country and i couldn't need to see me again we can't see it and the new generation leaves the way and mom needs no you need to share the screen with this video too you're only sharing the power point okay let me see if i can share share your screen again i will stop share and play share it again share sorry for that everyone can you see it yes okay great let's enjoy a seed can change the world a seed becomes a farm a farm feeds the country a country raises a new generation and the new generation leads the way into a brighter world for nearly 15 years main springs has helped tansanese plant these seeds literally mr max has already planted over 500 seeds today and it's not even lunchtime beans papaya corn peppers limes kale pomegranate eggplant and a bunch of other crops we don't even have time to make our permaculture farms have become so successful that we found at the permaculture institute of tansanese teaching farmers across the region how sustainability leads to prosperity sustainability is the same reason we built a school here students discover explore and pursue their own passions that's how we ended up with this robotics club and this amazing second dance team incredible things happen when you give everyone the chance to lick their drinks you don't just help one person you touch the lives of everyone that person helps like elizabeth and pay Elizabeth wants to be the minister of education and tansanese and pay was going to be a reporter highlighting the injustices in our country they were two of the first residents in our girls and now they're inspiring the next generation of girls to become strong independent leaders like these girls and this group and those girls but it's hard to transform your own community when you're sick i mean dr kajira she thinks laughter is the best medicine but not from laria actually for that she prescribed a three-day treatment of anti-malarians permaculture education health care and empowering girls that's what we believe creates a sustainable future we do it because we believe in the potential of every person we believe in the potential of every single person to grow into something remarkable i see really can change the world but first we have to plant it together i would like to give the word to john yeah thank you that was really lovely where i'm very curious about your story but it was already continuing show okay i would like to give the word to john oh because john has been to mainsprings as well so john would you like to share a couple of words yes a couple of words um hello everyone i'm not by the fire today it's eight in the morning but i did make a fire yesterday outside so maybe inga you could start the video and i can discuss that over it we'll see if this works give it a shot maybe in what's happening are you seeing anything difficult quite quite spaces i see a folder called videos with nothing in it do you see any i'll show do you see anything let's see black oh yes maybe maybe it's coming but it's it's taking a little time really go but oh it's it's a tinkly guitar oh yes oh there's me right well it's moving rather slow but uh i'm not sure that's going to work for us let me see can i share my screen instead yes i don't know if it yeah let me try try sharing because that either that's not working for me or kumar hello kumar so i'm going to try it once more and then we'll see if it works and then if it does okay so i'm at the um it's called the uh it's called the university it was called the university of the trees this was the home of christopher hills who created spirulina as a superfood he thought it would be possible to share this all over the world and um it has become quite the quite the thing and so i i'm standing near a statue of st francis and truly all the animals come here and they don't seem to be afraid of me at all so the other day one of my colleagues here the bird actually landed on on her just landed on her shoulder so we can expect this kind of thing now and this place is a is a beautiful place that is restoring both the forest around it and growing a food forest and permaculture planting and it's it's partly to it's partly to do restoration work and it's partly to help people to heal so this is that garden is called the garden of forgiveness so i guess for my sins i'm in the garden of forgiveness instead of at home partly because the covid has kept me locked out but i just i just wanted to say that being in nature is something that is really very helpful for me personally and going to to the main camp mainsprings in tanzania was also quite an experience because it's such a beautiful place right on the edge of lake victoria and i had been in the region before but it was kind of a hectic time where i was studying and taking a jeep journey through the country so it was a lot of work and so this time i got to see the the camp and and mark shepherd was training there and there were campers or people who had come for the training in and i believe that this is a methodology for massively growing east africa into a camp's movement just in east africa so there are many countries there all needing the same thing so if we can build little oases in the training places then i'm pretty sure it will spread throughout the region and in my experience working with the united nations and other organizations is that this is exactly what needs to happen in africa because these the conditions change when the land changes and when the understanding changes and if the understanding and the the landscapes don't change then poverty is more or less inevitable so the the fact is we can't go there and and and change the situation but we can help to train the local people to do it and this is here's here's saint francis who's got a bird on his arm anyway um i think it's it's really going to be a wonderful way to develop the camp's movement and for a lot of people to be able to go and share the experience and understand what's happening in other parts of the world so east africa is one and i i have to tell you that central america and south america and asia and parts of the mediterranean and the middle east all have this have these issues and when i began to think about this after after quite a long time of studying and participating in in big restoration programs i realized that the only way we're going to succeed is if we do this together and as as humanity humanity needs to do this not agencies the only agency that can succeed is human civilization so um this place is very beautiful and i'm i'm i'm working on this this is run by an organization called grow the change and it would be very wonderful for grow the change to join the movement and i think they they they will um we've been discussing how how to go about that and uh i also wanted to go back to the fire side chat theme so hope what i did was i built a fire and so you can hear the frogs singing in the background this was very very interesting last night because we have a lot of frogs and there's also some other really endangered species in this region and it was very contemplative that's why i play this tinkly music it's sort of meditative it's trance music or something like that um and i i started thinking about energy flows because when you burn this fire when you burn the wood then the energy is released and and it's it's it's it's also connected to really long historical time because people sat around the fire and i was i was thinking about we've lost something that i think is we used to dance around the fire and then uh when we wanted it to rain or we danced around the fire to celebrate fertility at certain times of the year this is the moment for that i think but um i'm going to stop here because it's over and i'm going to stop my share and thank you for listening to me i hope i didn't babble too much and it's great to see you all and to have this opportunity thank you john thank you for your words and um i would like to give the word to to chris i um will share my screen again but this time i can't make any mistakes so hopefully you all see the presentation from chris and good morning good evening good afternoon to all of you wherever you are in the world it's a pleasure to be here today i'm very excited to share the story of mainsprings um so we started as an organization about uh well six 15 years ago now so we're we've had a little bit of of history and all of that but i wanted to first and if we can go to the next slide um talk about how i got to tanzania so i was born and raised in uh Tulsa, Oklahoma here in the usa and my path to tanzania actually started when i stood up on my kindergarten career day and said i want to be an exotic animal veterinarian and the serengeti national wildlife park of tanzania east africa i had wild ambitions of living and working with wildlife in serengeti and always dreamed of going there and my grandmother who was in enga can we go to the next slide and my grandmother who was at my kindergarten career day um said i promise when you turn 16 um i will take you on the safari and so every year we'd talk about the different parks we wanted to visit and research both tanzania and kenya and this dream just continued to build throughout my entire childhood and as we were actually planning to go on the safari my grandmother threw a little wrench in the chain and said in order for you to get the safari um i want you to volunteer and work in tanzania at the center for street boys and you know if you do that for two weeks then we can get a two-week safari and i said absolutely not i'm not interested in working with people let's just stick to the animals and she said tough cookies you get both or none and so i dragged my feet as a 16 year old on this volunteer trip and we'll go to the next slide so went with my grandmother when i was 16 and we volunteered at a center for street boys for two weeks and i can say hands down it was the one trip that changed my entire life my world view my perspective of privilege and i immediately fell in love with the culture and the people and everything about tanzania and devoted to going back throughout the rest of my high school summers to volunteer at the center for street boys it was a very new organization when i first started there they only had a couple of buildings one building had 98 boys and only one dorm pair and it was completely packed and i noticed after talking to these boys and the staff and the director that you know they were really struggling to get by they oftentimes only had enough to provide very basic meals just twice a day they had no protein they had no vegetables and so i decided that you know during my school year i would try to fundraise for various projects and the first one we did was a chicken project and we wanted free-range chickens and so that's me on the the right building a chicken coop where they can go up at night but we wanted to just be able to you know instill a little bit more sustainability within this organization and it was a great learning experience i started to learn swahili the national language of tanzania i got to know more about the challenges of tanzania got to know more about the culture throughout those years but one question kept coming up over and over and that was where the girls so if we can go to the next next slide at the time when we started mainsprings there were about five to eight organizations working with street boys and orphan boys in the area but not much was being done for the girls and many times these girls were in horrific situations we've had girls come directly from brothels some that were forced into domestic servitude situations some that were living on the street or just homeless and so we wanted to provide a safe and loving home for these these young women and i was only 19 years old at the time going into college i was young and dumb i like to say and just had this ideal fantasy of we're just going to build these these houses and be able to house these girls um and we did and so we started very very small in the beginning it was hard for us to eventually um you know even fundraise in the beginning and kind of get get everything going we started with one very basic house seven girls our first year and as we lived and worked in this rural community because we wanted to be out of the city um we realized that just providing a safe loving home for these girls was not enough there's going to be a much larger need for the community and we can't just educate and empower these women we have to work collaboratively with the entire community to address all of their needs so you know in the area there's very poor education um farmers have huge tracks of land but we're unable to even provide enough food for their own families throughout the year um there was minimal infrastructure in an economy there was no market in the area and there were major health issues a lot of people were dying or becoming very very sick from very treatable diseases because they didn't have access to a doctor and that's really how our entire organization came to be it was out of the necessity that was expressed to us by the community and by observing the community next one so like i said we started very very small this is actually our first house where we helped housed our first girls built with all local granite rock um and just did what we could year by year so the first couple years we were just very very true to that um we can go to the next one that idea of um empowering and just providing a safe loving home for these girls um here's a few of our our girls today um we have close to 30 graduates that are in college or beyond we have 48 girls on our first campus and 16 on our second campus and i'll get to that in a little bit um but they you know basically have nowhere else to go and we um house them in self-contained apartment style family style dormitories um where no more than eight girls live with the matrons that they can follow up with their school work their chores really make sure that they're developing these young women to become strong independent leaders for their society um but one of the other things we noticed which was the second thing that we did as an organization and we can go to the next slide Inga um was that education in the community um was very very poor the two pictures on the left of this screen here um are actually of the local primary school in the area um at the time when we just started as a girls home we were sending our girls to this public school and um there were over 900 students and only three teachers so they had almost a 300 to one across eight different grade levels 300 to one um student teacher ratio and obviously parents the community really really wanted to be able to provide a more quality education and so collaboratively with the community we built another school and we now have 450 boys and girls from preschool all the way through secondary school um we have a 16 to one student teacher ratio so a little bit better than the 300 to one and unlike a lot of the schools in Tanzania um that really just focus on the academics we really want to focus on the holistic students so we um teach them a variety of things you saw in the introduction video we have robotics and we have technology things we also encourage um local arts and local dance and and drumming we teach permaculture we have community service programs we really want to create holistic world citizens from our school who also excel academically and they do um since starting our school back in 2010 we've had a hundred percent pass rate on all of our national exams which nationally in Tanzania um less than half of students typically pass the national exam so our students are very well um set up and our school is actually ranked number 60 in the entire nation of Tanzania um out of several thousand schools so our education is top-notch and like I said our students are able to get a lot of hands-on learning um and like I said when we kind of were observing the challenges of the community um we noticed a lot of families just didn't have access to health care they'd have to travel 20 to 30 miles um to just go see a doctor or nurse oftentimes that was cost prohibitive for the types of families that needed to access that those services and so we wanted to do something about that we now have a full-time doctor and nurse in a small clinic who mostly focus on preventative um health education but also are able to provide a variety of testing and treatment for a wide array of tropical diseases different infections and um yeah just various health care services so that we can make sure that our students our staff and the entire surrounding community can stay healthy because if you're not healthy you can't go to the farm and work you can't go to school um it's obviously as we all know um a key um to living a healthy and happy life so we'll go to the next slide um so with all of these things going on we had quite a bit of land around us we were trying to do some gardening we were trying to do some some livestock it was kind of hit and miss for a long time and thanks to one of our now board members and um their foundation so it's the RJOF Reed J Oppenheimer Foundation and the Oppenheimer family they introduced us to Mark Shepard back in 2012 and he came and observed our campus looked at everything and he said we can totally retrofit this campus and make it a food forest make it more productive he was very excited it was grandiose ideas we're like this sounds great but how do we do it and so he started training us and our staff and some of the local community members on some of the basics of permaculture and we can go to the next slide and see um this is actually a picture of Mark just this past year in front of our very first demonstration plot um on the left you'll see this is what our land looked like before as you can see it's very very sandy soil um not a lot of um biodiversity happening um on the right you can see our very first tree rows that we um installed and planted and that's the beginning so that's that's kind of where we started and we had a very very rocky start um first of all there was a lot of hesitation even from our own staff and the surrounding community members about you know this method won't work this is this isn't how we do it this is you know we need this type of corn we need these beans you have to put this fertilizer in the soil you have to do this watering and so it took um you know a good couple years to really get by even even stuff like maintaining mulch and keeping mulch on on trees was a struggle for the first couple years and our biggest struggle also came when um our staff decided not to keep the goats uh contained very well so we actually had planted several hundred trees in these tree rows and the very first year um about six to eight months after we planted them all the goats destroyed absolutely everything in our fields we had several acres of trees just completely decimated by both our own goats which we ended up getting rid of and getting sheep instead as well as the neighbor's goats so we had a very rocky start but after a couple years and just kind of staying with it um our staff and and community really started to see the change um on the left you'll see actually a picture of our our neighbor's property um as you can see it's completely sandy soil it's um just maize that they're trying to grow and they really don't get a lot out of their their farms even if a single family can have 10 or 20 acres um they really oftentimes like i said don't get enough to even feed their families let alone sell for a profit and on the right is a recent picture of mark shepherd in our food forest and you can see there's a variety of squash bananas plantains neem um trying to see what else is in there but a variety of citrus and other fruit trees um and it's really a prolific um you know only eight years later but it's still just a prolific and productive yeah system that is that is really really working so we can go to the next slide so like i said the first years were very very rocky but one of the things that we've learned time and time again whether it's with education and trying to change kind of the theory of you know how do we educate a student how do we make a student a well-rounded student um whether it's you know the different types of health care services we provide that may seem different um we've learned that leading by example has always been a very successful way to get community involvement and that's exactly what happened with permaculture once our neighbors in different organizations started to see how different our farm and our soil is compared to the neighbors and the other areas they've seen they start asking questions of you know how is this possible why do you do it this way what's what's happening here and we started engaging a lot of different community members in that conversation got more staff started expanding our farm we had a lot more buy-in we got you know more people trained in in our permaculture design courses and really just started to see things click more and more you can see on the next slide there's a lot of community members coming and learning about berms and swales and key lines and different design features of ways they can implement these techniques on their farms one of the things we also wanted to do as an organization is make sure that we were um using very local techniques local tools um low cost inputs so that we could be a living example for you know we're not some international organization that just comes in and spends a ton of money to make this happen you know we're doing this in a very local way and you can see it for yourself actually happening um so this is one of our permaculture design courses last year and you can see just the next couple slides a couple of our more mature food for us again we're only eight years in but before all of this it was just completely sandy little bit of grass maybe some shrubs but not much happening as you can see now we have plentiful fruit we have a variety of livestock from pigs to milk cows to rabbits chickens and this is also a great satellite image that we found so if you can see our main property outline of the main garden that we started back in 2012 still as I said by 2014 not a lot was happening we were still trying to get that by and we were still trying to get people to understand the different techniques and methodologies but you can see from the same day in 2014 which is sometime in January to the same day in 2020 there's just a massive transformation you can see you know much much more tree coverage a lot more green and I think that really kind of helps to to show how much is happening in a relatively short amount of time and one of the more impressive things too is this is a recent photo that we've taken this is the soil from our neighbor's farm literally right next door to us compared to the soil on our farm there's it was probably taken about 10 to 20 meters apart from each other so you can see just the massive difference even within 10 to 20 meters of that transformation in the soil and that's really you know what we love to see so there's a few things that we're doing as an organization the first is we really wanted to you know not just stay in that one community of this village called Kitonga we wanted to take what we've learned take what we've done and try to transplant that and be a replicable model in another community so back in 2017 we decided to purchase another piece of land which is about 40 45 acres and again it's right on the shore of Lake Victoria but it's about three hours away from our first campus and an entirely new community and much like the first campus as you can see it was just a barren piece of land where even the previous owner as you can see on the right had cut down most of the trees and the property for wood or for whatever and you know not much was being done with it except for very poor harvest of cassava so in 2017 we started transforming that land designing it we can go to the next slide and you can see the difference so these two photos are actually 2018 on the left and 2019 so there's only about a 16 month difference between the two pictures right there and you can just see the the transformation that's happened and on the second campus we are going to do the exact same thing that we've done on the first one of replicating everything from the girls home so we've already started the girls home on a very small scale with 16 girls we've also started a primary school so we have up to second grade now and we'll continue to add different grade levels as they the students progress we're also going to be providing health care and we're also going to be doing the same type of permaculture education and trying to spread this around this community as well so we're very excited about the you know possibility of growth and and what can happen there and as you saw in the video we've also in the past couple years started the permaculture institute of Tanzania because we've seen all of this success we've seen all of this stuff that's happening within our own organization but we you know decided that's not good enough we need to do a lot more this needs to be spread not only you know to our campuses in this one community we need to spread as John said all throughout East Africa and all throughout the world and so we've created partnerships with the Oppenheimer Foundation Mark Shepard and several other organizations who really struggled to you know have the ability both knowledge as well as financial ability to start their own permaculture farms and so we started very very slow about three years ago had eight people in our first official international PDC course and last year we opened it up and provided grants to local organizations from Malawi, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and Uganda and had about 30 35 people or so attend that course received training for Mark Shepard and one of our own permaculture trainers who's on staff and they are now working throughout all of East Africa to really kind of have this type of transformation in their own communities and combine there's 10 organizations plus mainsprings and what's truly amazing is through this this partnership and this grant opportunity and different funders the collective impact of our organization is over 11 000 people so we were making you know a massive impact by not doing too much more other than basic support and training and all of that and that's you know exactly what the ERC community is about and that's why we're so excited to be involved in this community and involved in this movement and you know just fit perfectly in with what we're doing and yeah we're excited to kind of continue so I think we're yes yes so I think we're kind of running a little bit I know we wanted to leave plenty of time for questions so that's my kind of brief intro and how I got to Tanzania what we're doing now and where we want to go in the future but I will kick it back to Inga and happy to answer any questions anyone has yeah thank you Chris such an amazing achievement I see we only have 15 minutes for the first hour so please if anyone has a question raise your hands um and I will give you yes Melissa first yes hi everybody Chris thank you for sharing this was so inspiring um hi John um so I was wondering how did you start communication within this these communities I mean was there English communication or did you have to find I mean how does that start how do you go about that um so that's actually a very good question I didn't mention that so we've we've designed it with our permaculture institute to have both Swahili lessons for local community members and those are typically free courses for different small organizations or small small hold farmers and that's done entirely in Swahili because a lot of those people don't know English but then for the international ones since we do have international trainers and have people from different countries because even in east Africa there's several different um so we do those international courses um in English because that's just the common language okay so I was wondering if that's something that could go with the ecosystem restoration camps is teaching English also to the to the local communities but that's that's a good idea to learn the other language and we we do some English education for parents within our school so we do have family literacy programs and do try to improve literacy both Chris I can't hear you at this point but can can you hear me yes yes now I can hear you can sorry about that no worries all right is another question you can also raise your hand fire them um using the um option in zoom Chris could you maybe um tell me more about your um goals what would you like to achieve in the upcoming years yes so in the upcoming years what we'd like to do as our own organization is continue to develop these campus models across Tanzania so we'd like to have eventually four or five different campuses and different rural communities and we want each of those places to serve as a hub for transformation kind of on the wider wider you know stage and so we really want to continue what we did last year with these first 10 organizations we partnered with and find you know at least five to ten organizations per year um around east Africa and continue to kind of have this widespread movement and training through through them and the other exciting thing that we're very excited about is it doesn't have to be with our erc connections now it doesn't have to be just limited to east Africa we want people from all over the world to come and see what we're doing and get involved in both the permaculture side of our mission and all the other things that we're doing because we say that permaculture is the thread that kind of holds everything else together and kind of provides for everything else within our organization so that's you know really kind of become the core of what we're doing thanks are there any other questions from people yes Joanne hello I'm really excited to hear about the main springs in Tanzania and because of I lived in Kenya for a really long time so I was always wondering what with permaculture is going on there and I read about Wangari Matai who started the green belt movements and I was wondering if there is any kind of crossover there um we have not been connected to them yet we're obviously open to any new partnerships and connections but we haven't um yeah been in touch with them yet so that would be that'd be a great connection yeah thanks yes fairness I will ask you to unmute you're still muted so sorry you're you're still muted I will do you hear me now I didn't press the button sorry yes we can Chris did you ever hear about I met John by the way at the project in Uganda which is called URDT did you ever hear of them because what is interesting of their model is the way they spread the knowledge over the area yes and John has shared that with us and we are getting in touch with them so they're they seem like a fantastic organization seem like they also do a lot of female empowerment and yeah so they they I think would have a very they'd be a very cohesive relationship that we're looking forward to are there any other questions from people I see a question what can we do Chris to support your project well that's a great question first of all you know we constantly need people to help us spread the word so we post on social media Facebook and Instagram if you just like us at mainsprings the janitor bachelor foundation for children and then also we have a variety of videos so one thing that for the sake of time we cut out one video because it's a little bit longer but there's the permaculture ripple effect that further explains kind of our partnerships and what we're doing along with a lot of other varieties so first thing is helping to just spread the word via social media or on on YouTube and if on YouTube just type in mainsprings Tanzania and you'll find us and then also we're a nonprofit organization as many of you are so any any sort of assistance with partnerships fundraising we're always looking for collaborative partnerships in that way so those are kind of the two big ways that people can can help as well as we are hoping later this year to have some camp opportunities so spreading the word and helping to get people to those camp opportunities will be great we're just figuring out all of the covid stuff currently thanks i hear that tuxley has a question hello hi chris um yeah this was this was somewhat related in terms of uh someone with with some permaculture skills and interested in in helping out i guess i guess you're working on the camps but is there in terms of uh how would you recommend someone the best way for them uh to get get involved not necessarily with your projects but but in in in general and where where would you suggest a person start if they want to to spend time and dedicate themselves to some of this work um i think the erc platform is probably the best place to start um we all know that so we as an organization and camp have decided that we will accept longer term volunteers and want people to come whether it's for a specific you know course that we're offering or whether it's kind of for a two or three month stint and if they have experience that is even better um so definitely either through the erc website um in that interest form that's a great place to start and they can also visit our our website that's a lot of other information of volunteering and stuff we'll be updating it again soon it still has a lot of good information okay thank you i see a very interesting question from joe murray in the chat joe do you want to ask it in in person or shall i read it yes joe i will ask you to unmute first yeah hello everyone um i work with a small NGO based in dublin in ireland and uh i've just been you know talking to a sister organization which is very involved in central america and obviously there's a huge problem there of indigenous people protecting their land and their forests and they're being threatened uh attacked and often killed by corporate interests and it's not just happening in central america but latin america and elsewhere throughout the world and i'm wondering what this community can do to support people like that who are on the front lines and who are paying the highest price often with their lives yeah i think that's a fantastic question i think it goes um at least for us as an organization our philosophy is to try to work with those communities and with the government whether it's on a local scale or even on the national scale we do both um and it takes a lot of time it takes a lot of patience especially when you're dealing with developing country governments and things like that but you know if you're really going to have systemic change we believe and we've we've seen this because the government has gotten much more involved with our organization as we've grown um we've seen that you know by starting kind of small and just growing organically with the community and just continuing to prove that you know what we say is what we're going to do um the government gets more and more involved and then you can have more of a platform and i think a lot of us within our own communities again whether it's local or nationally um do have somewhat of a platform where we can after a bit of time and a bit of reputation start to speak up for those disenfranchised populations and there's been lots of examples of you know in the past few years Tanzania has kind of had major hits on female rights and contraceptive issues there's been the Masai tribe has been um they're a nomadic tribe in Tanzania so they've had a lot of struggles with the government and keeping their own land and being on national reserves so there's been a lot of struggles there um and there's also just a lot of backwards agricultural policies in Tanzania that we're trying to change um for instance it's technically illegal to save your own seeds in Tanzania so there's a lot of a lot of things that you kind of have to start very small like i said it takes patience you have to show them what you're doing why you're doing it try to get them to buy in to what you're doing and then start that secondary conversation of oh how can we make that change on a larger scale so we have it both internally externally as well thank you very much so if i could add one word or a few words about that um one of the things that we noticed is that for instance here in north america we've had the indigenous people who've been trying to defend their water sources against industrial actions that are bringing pollution into the river river areas and um one of the things that we saw was that the indigenous people are very vulnerable to police or paramilitary or corporate security people just killing them and um in in one of these things it was the natives were mainly the grandmothers were organizing it so the older women were were the leaders but the young men and you know had to come and stand in front of the of the danger really and one of the one of the elders said because america has all these veterans who have been in the wars in afghanistan and iraq and so on and so at at one point a very large number of these veterans came and they stood between the um indigenous people and the security forces and the security forces would not shoot them so this is a very risky thing but it was so beautiful to see and and what the elders said was we're going to be okay now that the white people have come to join this movement and um because it it changes the dynamic completely and there is a huge opening for doing this around the world and it is it is hard but i think that's what we need to do is put ecosystem restoration camps everywhere and make sure that they're turning into these beautiful green oasis and then what what can happen is that the local people have some support and some further feeling of security and the officials are worried about public opinion globally and it gradually so so the main thing is peace building and acting from compassion for everybody not you know because i think the the oppressing people they're victims too really they're they're not if they if they do these horrible things it's not going to help their them either it's going to they're going to be have a terrible life because of what they've done and so that's uh you know that's what i think we have the chance to do and it's amazing to have a chance to affect these things all over the world who would have thought that we could do that so it's really for me that's that's one of the great reasons to do this and john you just sparked something else in me i'd already mentioned kind of with all of this idea of working with the government and kind of trying to get policies changed but the other thing that we firmly believe in and i've seen time and time again is you know so many times people in extreme poverty especially in east africa because that's what i've seen the most of but um i think it's true around the world people in extreme poverty don't have the education they don't feel empowered they don't feel like they have a voice um to speak up for themselves and one of the reasons i love this movement what all the different camps are doing is in different ways around the world we're working with communities and people to educate and empower and i you know it could be about a permaculture design course but through all of that you're also given christ you you're frozen for a bit in god oh yeah you're back i think is it me or oh we can't hear him oh we can't hear him okay unfortunately he was just telling something really important um hello yes you're back i think okay let's hope christ will join us again soon yes christ i see you but we and the microphone is still still off so maybe well somebody else should speak because he's somewhat frozen he is oklahoma seems as far away as tanzania that's true john but we could we could be starting to talk about legal teams what you discussed in in the chat i mean we are one hour behind so people feel free to stay and discuss more um on certain topics um um so Melissa yeah hi again um yeah i wanted just to elaborate on my question because i'm thinking if you know we're going into doing these wonderful projects and helping indigenous tribes save their save their land i mean i just don't see how without a very strong legal team they can even communicate with the government if they're up against big industries because we've we've all seen the disasters that have been happening i mean they have they have no they have no voice so i don't know how just communities of people who are trying to stand up against the government is that even has a chance so how does that work i mean are there are there legal teams created for these i mean is this exist in this kind of situation can you hello sorry about that um i know and oh your microphone is weird again really unfortunate john would you like to react on what Melissa said about the um legal issues well yeah there are there are areas there are groups that only do that but i i kind of feel like we need a holistic um thing so that the legal part is part of it but it's not the whole thing because you know if we just talk about these legal aspects and we don't talk about food or or empowerment because people what we're seeing now in in the camps in different parts of the world is that the people are empowered when they when they have enough food and nutrition and the community is working together to help one another so when they're when they're in a community and they're acting together as a community they're stronger than they are as individual and what's happening is the institution the corporations are trying to oppress these people they're trying to divide the people so that they'll be weaker and they can kind of have have more power over them so the the idea that someone wants to have power over someone else is not a very nice idea you know so i think this this can be discussed from from moral and from spiritual perspectives as well as just from like legal perspectives and i think that you know what we saw saw in the in the with gondi and the nonviolent movements is that that you know if you if you just try legal aspects or you are you actually confront the the that state that's a state of unconsciousness in a way you know it's it's bigotry it's racism it's it's oppression and you know people who are doing that they you know if they if their hearts once open they'll they'll just be miserable because they'll be so ashamed of themselves and it'll be so miserable for them to face it and so they don't want to face it but if they do face it then so gradually we need to do that with compassion with kindness because if we confront them with with legalism like we're going to arrest you now well that's not going to change their their mind that's maybe going to stop them from doing something bad but it's going to leave them in the same state where they would like i would like to do something bad but i'm afraid to be punished so i'm not going to do something bad because you know so that's not the same as as being good you know that's stopping them from being bad but if if we can get them to the point where they process what this human being and living has equal rights then it's it's it's going to be better for us and for them too so can they be redeemed i mean i i remember going to rwanda after the after the genocide there and i felt really nervous a little bit to go to uganda like how am i going to feel when i get to uganda to rwanda and see these people and half of the people have been perpetrating these atrocities and the other half are miserable and victims and it was interesting when i when i went there because i realized that they're all victims and that until they have this truth and reconciliation and they can put the past behind them they carry this burden whether they were whether they were oppressed or whether they were oppressors and it is in restoration of the landscape and working together to make this happen for everyone and and they also had the truth and reconciliation and i think john were they actually i think john that's that example and also what chris was saying that the opposition from the government changed when they saw when the ecosystem restoration type of environmentalism was actually producing really positive results um that uh the opposition sort of moved away so that environmentalism became something to be embraced instead of opposed correct and i think that's what attracts me to exist restoration camps where we're not saying what people can no longer do we're showing how through restoration and regenerative use of the system we're showing a path where people can do and it's actually i mean the pictures are evidence uh that you show chris a really abundant state of life that we're creating so it's much better that's all of the story which would you show it in your film job it's it's that thing that attracts and makes an environmentalism something to embrace not something to be afraid of um so thanks chris altar for mentioning that see there's a hand in yes and i chris there's there's something in the there's something in just a moment there's something in the chat which you might want to turn off your video and then your audio will more more stable yes i think i fixed we've had an ice storm i'm currently based in oklahoma so i think i fixed it it knocked out one wi-fi but i got back on another can you all hear me now okay one yes sorry about that um so hopefully this fixes things but um don't know what all was left off from my conversation but i have seen a few of the uh questions in the chat if we have a couple minutes for me to answer those um there was definitely one from lisa um in new mexico that was wondering about the original boy school um and that one is still in existence we um have supported them with a variety of different food services and things like that um and also all of our programs except for the home the residential program are coed so we do have about half boys half girls um we had a lot of debate in the beginning as an organization of if we wanted to be coed or if we wanted just to be four females but in the tansanian society especially where we are um we felt that it it wouldn't be advantageous for us just to empower the the girls and not also you know teach and empower the boys to also kind of respect their rights and respect the relationship that they should have um so all of our programs are coed and we work you know with both boys and girls men and women to find that equity and empower both both sides of the the piece um we just have kept the residential program all girls because we know teenagers we know what happens um so for the safety of the girls didn't want to mix the the boys and girls especially with teenagers but everything else is coed um and also i i'm going to answer the second one about people from africa on the call so we do have an erc africa group and a lot of those are locally led um we as an organization one thing i didn't mention is i lived in tansania full time for about 10 years and about six years ago moved back to the us to be headquartered here really work on fundraising for growth and development but the main reason for that move and transitioning out of international staff is from the very beginning we wanted to be an organization run by tansanians for tansanians so for the past year in a bit we have a hundred percent east african staff in tansania our country director second in command all of our managers directors teachers they're all mostly tansanian a few kenyans as well but all east african running their organization they they are truly the ones that own all of the programs that we do and we are just here for support and connections and i like to say my job now is just to be a connector and just try to keep both accountability up up and above board but also just make the connections and make things happen for our team in tansania to do the actual work and believe that's very important yes um i know that mac raised her hands as well uh mac woker oh yeah i yeah i think you just addressed my question chris because it really was about um about building trust as as a white as a white person from a colonizing nation you know how do you get past the suspicion especially in the beginning before you have you know successful results to show for your efforts but i think you were you know you were saying that uh just now that you're trying to make it a total east african effort and but in the beginning it wasn't and i'm wondering how did you build trust was it through um local partnerships finding you know local local stakeholders who were really involved with you were there any you know i mean we have this problem in this country too when you want to uh you know working with communities of color who have every reason to distrust us you know to to build that kind of trust is uh and to build be able then to build capacity within the community is not always easy correct especially in the beginning like i said i was 19 and young and done when i started but from the very beginning um you know a communicating in swahili and the local languages is very important making sure that you respect the cultures make sure you learn kind of the intricacies of the day in and day outs of the culture how you greet people how you can communicate well um so that was definitely key from the very beginning is becoming fluent in languages becoming um well versed with the different aspects of the tansnian culture and especially the tribal region that we were in and then also the other really really big piece of all of that is um you know it can't be a top down leadership style it can't be just you do this you do this you do this obviously you know we do have employees they have contracts there's things like that but from one of the things that works the most in gaining trust is giving people ownership over things and if they have a piece of ownership if they have some skin in the project if they know you know my kids are going to go to this school as well i want it to be the best school possible or hey my family's also you know participating in this permaculture program and i want to learn everything i can hear so that i can help you know provide for my family better um you know having people with that level of ownership and that skin in the game is really key um to having a robust organization because now we have over um a hundred employees across both campuses and everything so it's again all East African and Tansnian they truly do own their different departments and their jobs thank you um Chris i i do have a question myself um congratulations that you're such a high quality school i'm very um interesting how how did you or how did the mainsprings be able to to have such a high quality of education how did you do that yeah so we have a variety of partnerships with schools around the world that help with our teacher development um from the very beginning we were all of our teaching staff was East African but a lot of them were trained in very traditional rote memorization type techniques um so what we have done is just collaboratively with them year over year month over month have staff development sometimes we have um professors and different people either from Tanzania or from the US or you know Malawi one time come in and do just different teaching methodology workshops really dive into our classrooms but always working with our teachers to address both the cultural needs um as well as try to have a little bit more of a holistic educational outlook so it's taken a lot of time because you're talking about slowly changing a mindset and kind of the teaching methodologies without compromising the cores of the culture and so that's why we wanted to do it very slowly and over time wow create achievements john yeah i i want to change course just a little bit and ask a favor of everybody i've started to do it personally like when i meet people i ask him to become a member of the ecosystem restoration camps movement because what i what i see is that our level of camp development is growing really rapidly so there are 37 camps now and that that's in like four years so that's really pretty rapid and we can see that many more camps are lining up to join and what we really need is more supporting members to make this thing work because there are going to be hundreds or thousands of camps pretty soon and in some places where the economies are really in trouble like let's say Somalia or some of these places like this where we can we can really make a difference by by supporting camps but in order to do that we either have to depend on very large donations from the existing foundations and charities or from the united nations or from governments or something like this but i think one of the problems and one of the reasons that i was so interested in helping to create this movement was because i didn't really feel like the institutional responses were fast enough or effective enough or and and especially they weren't very cost effective because the the high overheads for those institutions mean that most of the money which is is coming into those organizations goes to maintain the organization and only pennies on the dollar go out to the field to work in the field so if if we as people don't get our key and don't have a huge overhead then the majority of what we do can go to these camps and that depends on our ability to make a people-based organization a mass organization and so far we're still we're still a little bit behind in that in that area so we need to have vastly more people and i think if you just go and say look and it's not so much about money how much money is offered by the individuals it's more about that they actually make a tiny donation and we have millions of them so so if everybody could start 907 starting to peter today who are who are members and that's even less than we had that then in the very beginning we we ask people are there would anybody share 10 euros and when a thousand people offered to share 10 euros we said okay well we'll have to start but then we still don't even have a thousand after all this time but we do have bigger donors but that is not as effective i think in becoming a mass organization you know we can just be a normal organization that takes big money from big money but uh it's it's nice if if the membership continues to grow so that's that's my my pitch just tell your friends and family please join the ecosystem restoration camps but it's it's going really well there are lots of camps so thank you john it's just a very important to spread the world word i saw people responding on you what you were saying um so yeah that would be wonderful i know most of you are all already members so we are really really thankful for that and therefore we really enjoy seeing you here are there any other topics that people would like to discuss or like to know more about we are all here still in one call so we could still discuss very interesting topics yes gav hi everyone someone in the chat had a question for chris and i don't think we've covered it yet and it was around how does land ownership work in tanzania so as a non-tanzanian do you have it i'm curious to know is it on sort of a do you have a concession from the government is on long least do you own the land because that's that could be a very big barrier to entry for other people wanting to do similar projects in countries that they don't live in obviously there's local legislation and it differs from country to country but it'd be quite interesting to hear your perspective on how you handle that part of of your project development thank you um so when we first started again because we wanted to build trust within the community and with the government that a lot of things were very tricky to even figure out how you get registered we actually went under another umbrella organization which was that center for street boys um so we were under them for the first few few years in tanzania under their board of directors um while we slowly worked with the government to build trust and then eventually got our own registration so we are registered as a tanzania NGO with a partnership with our U.S. non-profit organization so in tanzania we have a local board that is all tanzanians again all local staff and they are registered as a tanzania entity and we always felt that was going to be very important so both any registered tanzania entity or company or individual can by land but when I say by landed in quotes it's actually 99 year lease from the government so that's how all land ownership works in tanzania is it is a 99 year lease so we we do get it deeded and we get a 99 year lease from the is that what is it renewable renewable because after 99 years you've made a lot of investment in the land yes i think it's renewable for a few dollars like you just have to kind of reapply for the deed yeah yeah so does that answer your question Catherine yes thank you and I'm just also quite curious to know um in terms of your ongoing relationship with the local government um have you received their approval for what you're doing with the land that they've made available to you and I've not I mean obviously they must be delighted with um the the the progressive media in terms of uplifting education and bringing that number down to 16 learners to one teacher but I'm specifically inquiring in terms of the permaculture development of the land yes I would say we've had much more success on kind of the district level so that's kind of like a county or kind of a subsect of a state so in our kind of area of a few hundred thousand people in our district um that government has definitely been much more involved they've sent different members of their agriculture team within the government to various trainings and tours of our farm um have gotten involved in that way um I would say we haven't been as successful going to the national level yet again there's just a lot of kind of international aid push that works against restoration in Tanzania um whether it's working with Monsanto and again you're not supposed to harvest your own seeds or sell your own seeds because they want all GMO seeds that are imported into the country um and that's just you know a profit for the government and that's why they do it so there's a lot of national policies um that we would love to change in the future but we're kind of working in our own own area first and we've even been working with team members at the ERC and with our our team in Tanzania to take on some government land in our district and help to reforest it because the tribe in the area has over the past several generations basically decimated cut down all the trees for firewood and charcoal without replanting so there's a lot of kind of the beginning of desertification in our area and we want to bring it back to that natural environment the government is definitely willing to work with us to regreen that and create a sustainable harvesting plan with the local communities as well so in our area of northern Tanzania yes on the national level no not yet oh all right may I ask a question on top of that question that that topic you were just talking about so um specifically about Monsanto how do you think you're going to confront that eventually to I mean because that's actually where I was going with the whole legal battle because you know when you're working with governments and the big industries they you know they don't want to let go of that money so even if you have a the holistic approach which I believe in which John you were so um you're so right about I think it would be much more of a peaceful way to do it and it should be done that way but when you're going up against that kind of money how what is what are your steps I mean what do you envision to get to that to that level um I think the this movement needs to be kind of I totally agree with John at the core of the you know this international um you know widespread people-centered movement that really creates just an international knowledge about what is happening and what needs to happen to our earth and healing our earth also helps heal the communities that our you know supports um but at the same time I think it is also important to get the bigger donors and and different big players in the international scene um you know for instance if we could collectively convince Bill Gates that this is the answer um there's your answer to Monsanto okay so that's a really really big high-level thing but John might be able to convince him one day um I think I would nuance that just a little bit it's very important that Bill Gates changes his mind because he's promoting GMOs and chemical industrial agriculture throughout Africa uh helping the world but the the thing that I think is critically important is that we have distributed resources so for instance knowledge or the knowledge of how to harvest water how to maintain and stimulate the lower hydrological cycle about seeds so you you really badly need to have seed saving and seed trading and this shouldn't be individuals because their liability if you have the situation that you have in Tanzania where it's technically illegal to save your own seeds then you need to have this risk distributed so having lots of ecosystem restoration camps with with seeds everywhere everybody has seeds seeds are shared seeds are traded seeds are saved and there's training in this that's how you defeat Monsanto not giving more power to Bill Gates but giving power to the people to protect and maintain the the genome the legacy genome it certainly doesn't belong to anybody anybody is going to die human beings haven't been here for 3.6 billion years since evolution has been creating this amazing resource so it doesn't belong to anybody and it should be shared in this way that's that's I think the best the best idea thank you um Joe you still had a question I think my question has been answered exactly on that point I like I'm horrified to hear that it's illegal to own your own seeds in Tanzania and I know that that's not just Tanzania it's all over and my question was how how do how do you operate in that situation does Chris manage to work around that and use indigenous open pollinated seeds and you know can that happen it it can happen um it's I will say it is underground it's a lawn in Tanzania so it wouldn't be able like to go on a massive scale of us selling different seeds and things like that but we do it on a very local scale and many farmers still do I don't think it's something that would be truly regulated on a local small scale level just because it's probably not that important to the national government however if it did become a business or it did become kind of a bigger movement of much larger exchanges that was actually affecting the economy behind the seeds that's probably where the government would step in so we we are able ourselves to harvest our own seeds and work with indigenous plant species as well um but just are not really able to do it on a large scale thank you Chris thank you are there any other questions on on this topic oh so there's a question from Darren that says can you speak more specifically about the success of permaculture food production and supplying food for the local project as well as the community possibly and that is winning or that possible winning hearts so um yes we do have a ton of food we have what's our kilos per year yeah so from our first campus farm we get about 50,000 kilos of fresh produce every year on top of livestock and on top of different fruits and and different perennial crops so we provide over a thousand meals a day at our school so we have breakfast and lunch for all of our students and staff i think chris is frozen again no no okay i was like i can see you um can you still hear me yes so yeah we have over from that one campus like i said over 50,000 kilos and that helps feed you know our own community so over a thousand meals a day but we also do a variety of community service projects where we reach out to different families and provide struggling families with food at different times and we also have a lot of excess that we can sell we're working currently on trying to do more value-added products so that we can sell in city markets and places and ultimately just become more sustainable as an organization as well so the first goal was definitely feeding our own campus and you know the hundreds of mouths that we have on our campus but from there since we have so much excess you know we're helping support beyond beyond our campus borders and also trying to help it help us become more sustainable in tansania because again that helps to lessen that dependence on the western country which is ultimately what we want yeah and how uh there's a question from others how do your neighbors feel what you were doing compared to their farm um so it's i would say it's hit and miss and i'm sure we've all experienced some people who can see something and really by end like we have so many of our neighbors who you know just walk because we don't have gates or fences on our campus so people just walk through all the time there's a public road through our campus and we love that because that allows people just to come and see the difference and we literally have traditional maze fields right next to our permaculture plot sometimes and that's a great example to show what transformation can happen in a relatively short amount of time but then there's obviously some who are still very stuck in their ways and there's a lot of education from the government and different kind of campaigns of use this fertilizer use this seed this is how you're going to you know make change so there's just a lot of conflicting information for some people so i'd say we have a lot of great great buy-in from the community a lot of people that have taken the different practices and implemented on their own land um but still working on others and i think that's that's probably always going to be the case because humans have different perspectives and different backgrounds yeah that's true i'm also very curious chris about um about the girls that you're empowering um what at what age do they leave the campus and and how how do they generally what what does their life look like after yes so that's a great question so we take girls as young as three but they can come in at any age and we basically since many of them get a kind of late start in life and maybe haven't had a good educational foundation um we do some educational testing see where the best placement is for them in our school and we are devoted to living with them on campus through the end of their secondary school or high school here in the western world so we do that on our campus and then for all of our residential girls we actually support them in their higher education as well um so we have several generous donors who help to pay for college or university fees some of them want to go into trade schools um there's some agricultural stuff so there's a variety of options but we want to support them all in getting their tertiary tertiary education whether that's like an associates degree or a bachelors we have some that are working towards their masters wow yeah so we we support them all the way through that wow and do you use the philosophy of permaculture in in your education system as well we do so we have that as a part of our extracurricular kind of lessons we have a permaculture lessons for all grades third grade and up um either once or twice a week depending on the week but yeah so we have our permaculture trainer that really focuses on educating our students and that's we believe again we want that holistic well-rounded student to graduate from our school and so that's we believe that's helping them be prepared for a globalized world and helping them understand technology but that's also helping them to really connect with the history of their culture and the different aspects of their culture as well as you know connecting with the land because so much of Tanzania still relies on farming and it would be a missed opportunity if we didn't have those 450 students get actively involved day in and day out in our permaculture programs wonderful john you raised your hand i i just wanted to add something um ferdy earnest there is has been at the ugandan rural development training centers and they have the african rural university which is an all women's university and so chris could you send your email to ferdy nest ferdy earnest there and um in the chat and maybe you guys could connect and and uh it would be wonderful if your girls could go to that university because when when those those girls from that university come out they be they become the the sort of leaders in community development in the in the communities that they come from and so that they're being trained to go back to the communities where they were abused and abandoned and become like the educated leaders of that of those communities and it's really powerful because they go back without any fear and with huge courage and commitment it's amazing so i really i really hope that that connection will take place yes and i i just sent my email along in a direct message and i'll go ahead and put it to everyone so you'll have it as well if anybody else has connections or everything that's a great connection john yes thank you um darin is asking uh chris do you have any interaction with local wildlife and nature conservation efforts integrated as part of a holistic ecosystem generation um so we currently do not um we're very close to the serengeti and we also have a relationship with the grimetti reserve fund and they have a hotel and do a lot of reservations um preservation restoration on their land so we do have several times where our students can go visit kind of the natural ecosystems and see what is happening there but we don't do it on our our campus currently one of the next things we want to do on a larger scale is like i mentioned work with the government on government land to kind of reforest some decimated areas but eventually i think that's something that we could definitely look into okay and also ellen asked a question how has this impacted your personal life over these 15 years um so life has been crazy like i said i lived in tanzania for 10 years and loved it and while i was there i actually adopted four boys myself um so that was a massive change in my personal life so i now have four boys um and they obviously moved back when i did to the u.s and so they're here now um but also even through learning and living the permaculture life when i moved back to the u.s i was in the city and had a house and just really wasn't fulfilled missed the life in tanzania and just during this pandemic last summer actually sold my house and moved to a farm here in oklahoma and have started uh working on restoration and design of that permaculture method so um yeah it's through basically our entire mission is my life as well so whether it's a personal side or the organizational side um i want to live what we what we preach so it's impacted me in a great way that's all fantastic things that have happened in my life because of this work amazing such a inspirational story for all of us yeah and that is a young age 19 that's really i don't know it's a beautiful story we should tell everyone from the ERC movement about it um are there any more questions or topics that people would like to discuss i see wonderful compliments in the chat yes and thank you to everyone for the wonderful compliments it means a lot yes okay i think we are going to to end end it a bit thank you all very very much for well your contribution and thank you chris and john for your time and your explanation and your words and the inspiration of course um i really enjoyed it sorry for the technical issues and at the beginning we'll improve that for next time but we're really thankful for all of you and um hope to see you soon again um for the next fireside chat will be next month the second tuesday of the week