This is a fantastic story of a woman who started giving away excess garden produce for free and then others started also leaving their excess produce for others - poor or just sharing people, to take as they need. Lou Ridsdale started "Food is Free" 6 years ago in Ballarat in Victoria and its still going strong.
Our friend sent this little video from Australia.
I had never bothered to travel abroad before 2014... I was also told by elders that all civilization, all culture, all history, was really only in India, and not elsewhere !
I bought the crux of this thinking, but began to Q this recieved wisdom when about ten years ago, i deeply read about WW2 and its aftermath in Europe.
Mainland Europe - and Britain, were in 1945 at the end of the war, bombed out ruins over large parts.. Agriculture, sewage, water systems, train stations and bridges were destroyed..
1 % British, 6 % of Austrians, 8 % of Germans, 9 % of Greeks and Yugoslav people and 17 % Poles were dead as a result of the war.
All other countries in Europe had also lost large nos. of their people.
There were large food shortages in Europe towards the end of the war and after it, even resulting in mass starvation in a few countries.
India had suffered too ofcourse, with 2 million dead in the Bengal famine in 1943 because of British mismanagement, and a further 2 million dead during the partition riots in 1947 (0.5 % of the population of undivided India).
A lakh soldiers from India had also perished in WW2, fighting on the British side.
So Europe set to rebuilt itself, and so did India, 2 years apart - 1945 and 1947. But the difference, even between the poorer economies of East Europe, and India, is vast. Even if they did have a head start on industrialization, and had exploited other regions of the world, this did not fully explain to me, why we were so much behind.
I decided to travel to these countries to get a better sense of this.. so my family and I went to England, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and mainland Europe in different trips from 2014-2017. These were in the nature of study tours.. I had Qs I wanted answered.
Ofcourse these trips of 2 weeks each to a country were too small for in-depth study, but I did get some answers to Qs on farming, attitude to water supplies, degraded land, and the work ethic. And public transportation systems, urban planning et al..
But the most important learnings were about people.. I had been told Westerners did not value family life - which was patently false in my experience. The people we met also had meaningful friendships where they did a great deal to help each other out.
Most impressive was, that I have not met a single person in these nations who DID NOT volunteer frequently for causes they believed in.
The very elderly also in New Zealand and Britain, some of them on wheelchairs, volunteered in churches, changing flowers, guiding people, and collecting money to train guide dogs to help disabled people.
Our friend sent this little video from Australia.
I had never bothered to travel abroad before 2014... I was also told by elders that all civilization, all culture, all history, was really only in India, and not elsewhere !
I bought the crux of this thinking, but began to Q this recieved wisdom when about ten years ago, i deeply read about WW2 and its aftermath in Europe.
Mainland Europe - and Britain, were in 1945 at the end of the war, bombed out ruins over large parts.. Agriculture, sewage, water systems, train stations and bridges were destroyed..
1 % British, 6 % of Austrians, 8 % of Germans, 9 % of Greeks and Yugoslav people and 17 % Poles were dead as a result of the war.
All other countries in Europe had also lost large nos. of their people.
There were large food shortages in Europe towards the end of the war and after it, even resulting in mass starvation in a few countries.
India had suffered too ofcourse, with 2 million dead in the Bengal famine in 1943 because of British mismanagement, and a further 2 million dead during the partition riots in 1947 (0.5 % of the population of undivided India).
A lakh soldiers from India had also perished in WW2, fighting on the British side.
So Europe set to rebuilt itself, and so did India, 2 years apart - 1945 and 1947. But the difference, even between the poorer economies of East Europe, and India, is vast. Even if they did have a head start on industrialization, and had exploited other regions of the world, this did not fully explain to me, why we were so much behind.
I decided to travel to these countries to get a better sense of this.. so my family and I went to England, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and mainland Europe in different trips from 2014-2017. These were in the nature of study tours.. I had Qs I wanted answered.
Ofcourse these trips of 2 weeks each to a country were too small for in-depth study, but I did get some answers to Qs on farming, attitude to water supplies, degraded land, and the work ethic. And public transportation systems, urban planning et al..
But the most important learnings were about people.. I had been told Westerners did not value family life - which was patently false in my experience. The people we met also had meaningful friendships where they did a great deal to help each other out.
Most impressive was, that I have not met a single person in these nations who DID NOT volunteer frequently for causes they believed in.
The very elderly also in New Zealand and Britain, some of them on wheelchairs, volunteered in churches, changing flowers, guiding people, and collecting money to train guide dogs to help disabled people.
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