Sadhana Forest's Model Village

 

On Friday I went to Sadhana Forest, which is a community of people who live together in huts like these that were built with their own hands.  They live completely off-grid, all the electricity they need comes from solar panels and human power (with cycling machines), and they also get all of their own food from what they grow and what the forest provides them with.

Every Friday they welcome outsiders to come and walk around their community, where everything is connected by dirt roads and surrounded by trees that the first inhabitants of Sadhana Forest planted.  Afterward there is a movie showing and then a vegan dinner that is prepared by the volunteers living there.

The first two clips that they showed were an introduction to Sadhana Forest, and how they are now working on creating a Sadhana Forest in Kenya and Haiti.  They take completely barren pieces of land and reforest it to make it inhabitable once again.

The vegan dinner consisted of some sort of soup, rise with beet fruit jam, some papaya salad, and jackfruit.  I thought it was bland at best, but all the community members seemed to enjoy it thoroughly.  To wash the dishes we used coconut husk and ash, and composted any uneaten foods.

I really admire that they can live for 6-12 months or even longer off of an all-vegan diet made of food they harvest themselves, and like in thatched-roof huts open to all of the elements (and the mosquitoes, which I couldn’t stand after just three hours!).  Although Auroville still relies on many imports and the grid to get electricity, I hope that Navadarshanam and Pun Pun Farm are more like Sadhana Forest!