Our school has two types of activities throughout the year.  Our full-time boarding students generally arrive in January and finish their studies in June.  Then, from August until December, we have a variety of short-term workshops (ranging from 1-5 days) for both youth and adults in our community.  We have been hosting these workshops since 2008.  Workshops provide people with opportunities to learn who cannot take time off of their daily work to attend our full-time program.  This is particularly useful for people with families, and for students in high school who only have summers and weekends off.  

For our first workshop, we built a composting toilet out of adobe bricks. We had over 50 youth come and participate. It was a great success and everyone was totally excited that they had the ability to build interesting and beautiful constructions by themselves, while paying nothing for it! The washroom now looks like this:

Students learn about scioning, grafting, budding, and other vegetative propagation techniques, using low-input materials. These methods can allow villagers to help in their family farms by producing fruit trees that bear fruit in short times.

One student from Houa Khoua village, practising budding.

Students bottling bamboo shoots for the dry season.

Fried bananas can provide a source of income.

In July we learnt about erosion control on flat and sloping areas.

We also have workshops on animal raising, green business, family bookkeeping, health and nutrition, gender and equality, conflict resolution, land law and legal training, and computers.

Keep checking out this page for updates and pics!