CAP-OP2: Introduction

The year 2014 has so far been less tensed than the previous one. The security situation in Damascus and its surrounding improve in general, except for mortars that keep landing randomly in the city center. Some area have seen settlements aka national re-conciliation which mean cease fire and ending all armed presence to be back entirely under official control. The town where my parents live was among the early ones to witness such peacemaking after being under siege in February. A full scale settlement was reached by April, which enabled people to go back to their homes, shops where open, and life started to come back to normal again. The settlement was a great example that many other towns followed. And since roads were re-opened, this made is easy for me to drive the kids to my parents’ and go to work, ending a long period of working-at-home modality.

On the personal level, this year seems to be the time when I start to see the first young starts of the seeds I planted during the past year(s). Therefore it was important to do a re-visiting of my strategic goals for the capstone year, as recommended in professional review of the LIPD, by expanding  on and re-phrasing the goals to be SMART and adding clear indicators and milestone to measure progress. This section explains why working on Urban Agriculture project forms a major step on this way and  how the specific goals of the UA project serve the bigger vision.

My work on urban agriculture started in May 2011. Early beginnings were documented in my second OP, 1^st year of the current  diploma program. Most of the work that I carried out between then and now at my home was on adding more plants to my collection and improving my knowledge of their types, needs, and how to take care of them.

However I had a golden chance to take this work to a bigger level, which will not only serve my learning goals but also my ambition to spread knowledge on permaculture in a practical way.

After attending the UA training, I made several contacts with many parties in order to start sea bigger initiative for spreading UA in Damascus while adding more permaculture elements into the training curriculum. This would provide a great entry point for spreading permaculture-based knowledge in a simplified and easy way without going through the complications of the philosophy which may scare many people away. For this sake I planned to invest the connections and networking I made during my years of a) working with environmental local NGOs, and b) international permaculture community, mainly the Permaculture Research Institute PRI of Australia.

Finally, It is important to note that this OP does not describe a full project, rather it is about documenting developments on a) personal level  and b) planning and starting a bigger UA  in Damascus, within the framework of bigger learning plan. The OP covers the following areas:

• My learning goals
• Gardening and other activities at home
• Update on the urban agriculture training and network
• Update on t he developments of planning for a bigger project
• Highlights of similar experiments being done in my surrounding