Yay! It's fair to say that I am SO ready for this, after months of waiting, talking and planning!... I'm finally about to head to Portugal and get this ecoVillage off the ground! This is SO exciting and I know all of us involved cannot wait to meet and start the manifestation of ecoVillage #1!

The basic plan is this. I will fly to London Gatwick airport tomorrow, and at the airport am meeting up with two very special souls Jon and Gavin. Jon is a very old friend that I met in India in 1997. I haven’t met Gavin yet, but he is a good friend of Jon with many important skills, and a big desire to support ecoVillage in whatever way he can. We will all fly to Portugal and head straight to Michael (@orlev) and Tslill's home. They live around 40 minutes drive from the land that we are currently working with, in Penamacor South Portugal.

Whilst we stay with them there will a lot of talking, thinking, brainstorming, and crystallising all of our visions for the ecoVillage. We all have one thing in common, and that is the desire to manifest this through natural giving. None of us want money, or rewards for our time and efforts. All we want to see is ecoVillage happen, and we are clearly prepared to do what it takes to make it so. @orlev and Tslil (his wife) have also started putting up a temporary structure, i think a TIPI on the land to get the ball rolling, and im sure we will help them with that and get our hands dirty with some good ol' Portuguese soil!

If you have been following either @orlev our myself on Steem you will know that there is an issue with the land that we are currently working with. The problem is that at this time we do not have permission to build permanent structures (homes) on that land due to a fire risk in that area. Portugal has had some serious fires in the past and the government are doing what they can to prevent this repeating. SO, in that vein @orlev is working with the local bureaucrats to see if he can get permission to test ideas and ways of protecting the land using Permaculture techniques. This could take time, but he is working on it!

SO, because we do not want to wait for bureaucracy we have another very (Very) exciting part of this journey! A couple of weeks ago I was overjoyed to get a huge donation from a dear friend who wants to see this succeed. He has donated around $35,000 to the cause, specifically to buy land that can be used to gift to the ecoVillage. We will therefore be on a side mission of looking for a new plot to buy and build on! We REALLY hope to get as CLOSE to our current plot as possible. The most important thing is that any new plot has full residential building permissions. So we will meet with some local international communities and see what we can find! If we do find the plot that we want, our amazing donor will visit in Late March to seal the deal.

IF we are successful in finding a new plot, it means that we can start building very quickly! We would then have different plots, and could use current land mainly for Permaculture and food production. This could work well, I like the idea of having more than one spot for various reasons! It makes things a bit more secure because any major issue with one plot may not affect the other. Also it means we can really dedicate @orlevs land to Permaculture instead of trying to squeeze both homes and fruit / vegetable production in the one space. Very nice! I would imagine that we would also build several much more simple (temporary) structures on @orlevs land that could be used in many ways!

So, because of this I will not be posting so much for the next two week! I will try to do an update as we go, and will definately be filming things and vlogging some of it... so when i return i will put something nice together for everyone to see.

I'd like to give a huge thank you and shout out to @artemislives, @porters and @misslasvegas for volunteering to help keep all our ecoTrain activities going whilst I am away. @porters will be launching the new QOTW which will post tomorrow, and @misslasvegas will be helping me curate the ecoLiving Weekly Digest. @artemislives is doing a zillions things for ecoTrain and beyond, so look out for her curation post which is called #greensteem . I will keep my eye on things as best I can, and will also try to comment and curate!

So PLEASE KEEP POSTING folks! I have written a post about why i say this.. If you would like to post anything to our community please make sure to use the POST TO ECOTRAIN COMMUITY option in www.steempeaak.com. I really love these new community features and am encouraging everyone to focus on that. You can also still continue to use the #ecotrain tag when you post, since that reaches out to our blog, which is a different area of Steem!

SO wish us luck.. I have a feeling this is going to be EPIC!
xx

A New Website to Easily Find Active Communities On Steem

Communities is a new layer on Steem. They are still new and are still developing and growing! New communities have been popping up like popcorn, and most of us have hard time finding ones that fit our personal interests. Steempeak has some filtering options, but they are not currently tied to specific keywords of the topics of the group.. and even if they are we can have so many communities to choose from, many with no activity, that it can be a bit like finding a needle in a haystack.

To help us all, @eco-alex has created a new website at https://www.steemcommunities.net . If you are looking to find new and active communities on Steem, or if you would like to white-list your own community and have it added to the database then please visit and check it out. There are many features, and it is extremely simple and quick to use. Just click on the topics that interest you and the relevant communities will flash up before your eyes with some simple descriptions and a link to further info. When you find a community you like just follow the link to www.SteemPeak.com and Subscribe!

https://www.steemcommunities.net

HOW TO SUPPORT THE ECO VILLAGE PROJECT
Disrupting the "Cost of Living" Industry

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