The Morning, The World

In the morning, the world seems not so great, I mumble myself and I don’t understand how could I've been thinking that such a way of living would be proper for me! The showers are on the next hill. Meaning that: I get dressed, I get down the hill, pass through the valley and climb another hill! And back!

I take my towel, be careful to have all my bio cosmetic products, even my toothpaste and I leave, grumbling in my boots... On my way back I am strongly convinced that the best way to start your day is with a walk of 800 m on the hills! I will argue for this from now on!

There are no locked doors in Tamera……not where I sleep, not at the offices, not at the cafeteria, club, nowhere………I let my laptop and my camera in different places, in the Students’ centre and overnight, my luggage everywhere outside…….careless. Because here confidence must be total! Otherwise the community would not resist!

At 8:30 Sylvius is waiting for us at the guest room, he's one of the community’s guides, a lean man, tanned, with a happy look in his eyes. He is here for 11 years, with his whole family, including two boys. We introduce ourselves, for the moment we are only 13 people in the group attending the orientation week. We are of different nationalities, from Brazil, Canada, Australia, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, more from Germany and only one Portuguese, the youngest member of the group.

Tamera is lying on 134 acres of hills, as said and the shape of the domain looks like an eagle landing. They are here since 1995, but they did their first steps in Germany, since 1978. The founders are a theologian, Sabine Lichtenfels, a sociologist Dr. Dieter Duhm and the physician - and at the same time musician - Charly Rainer Ehrenpreis, all starting with the intention of creating an alternative universality, to teach the humanity to re-connect with the nature. All around this idea they immediately gathered specialists in bionics, architecture, cymatics, informatics technology, medicine, but the research center they have founded in south Germany did not last in front of the internal conflicts of the group………… same old stories hundred years old…. power, jealousy, money! Better knowing people, experts, all animated by the best intentions ever, wishing world’s peace, in fact, were not capable of living in peace and harmony together!

What are the chances for such a project, big or small, whatever it may be, to resist? How it is possible to heal, to create a solid basis for any common purpose? Like.. the peace of the world?

There were no studies in this respect, so the founders decided to experience for three years living inside a community of 15 persons, without the possibility of giving up, in order for them to understand and to be able to build on some other basis. They have studied the communities’ necessary decision structures and how to manage mistakes, among other issues. They have learned that they must be interested by each other, the value of real communication; they have learned to build trust. So the source of violence came to be deeply investigated and so has been reached a level considered very intimate and private, they have reached love, partnership, living together, God, and even sexuality.

Further more, all the experience has been transposed by Dieter Duhm in The Political Theory, whose main idea is that a little change somewhere on the Earth influences everything, just like inside a body, therefore global peace starts from local peace and ultimately from the peace between us and inside us.


From this theory ‘till Tamera - The Research Center for the Peace, the road passed through various conflicts with the church and with mass-media in Germany, of course, like other projects such as ZEGG - Seminars Center for Experimental Cultural Design in Berlin, research on dolphins, initiation camps in the desert in some different countries…………so they have arrived in Portugal, Alentejo, in 1995, searching a place for a camp where people could redefine and rediscover themselves, the unfamiliar conditions being most favorable for such an introspection. The land has been bought with the aid of some private donations, with a few people they started workings of reforestation, development, and soon here could start, inside some tents, a Summer University with more than 100 students, debating energy themes, ecology, research and education for peace, but realized by a community who had already learn to build herself in a different way.

And yet, now that I am telling the story, I am in the same desert!

Now we are going on a lakeside……. enormous, and then another and another…………. water lilies, reeds, enormous fishes, orange fish to be seen in the water……….. there are flowers everywhere, everything around is green, the air is just like in the mountains, it is damp and chill………

"We have called a specialist in design, Sepp Holzer, an Austrian", says Sylvius. We complained that we have no water and he replied that we have more water than needed! Make lakes! Lakes, when we only had a little source of water, we wanted to cultivate the land, to refresh it, because it is almost destroyed, were could we find so much water?

"From the rain. It does rain in the winter, isn’t it?" Sepp replied.
"Yes, but in the winter we don’t need it, in the summer it is getting dry, in the winter nothing grows."
Sepp showed them that on their ground, between two hills, the ones I am always mentioning, there comes fresh water, sweet, so they could make a pipeline up to Barcelona, over 1500 km, with a section of 1 square meter, every year! And the lake is to be done in a few months, with a dam from natural materials, local…………..
It took them a while to get used to the idea. Now, when I am telling the story, everything seems so easy, and I have passed near the lake ten times already. But we didn’t think about this……..How many situations of this kind are happening in the entire World! Places like India, where it is raining but people just think they only depend on Gange, diminishing…..in a glance?

How great would be for everyone to have a lake? How much water are we really receiving without seeing it?
Even for the floods we are passing through, this would be a solution! To collect the water in lakes and use it whenever this would be necessary?

We are all confused. This must be something extremely complicated, it is too simple……How much food could each community grow? Moreover the temperature and humidity’s changes? Furthermore the humus taken from the future riverbed of the lake and taken wherever necessary? How many valleys forming streams would be now transformed and would become a real blessing?

We are passing by three lakes, already, one of them has more than 12m depth, a few acres in surface, another one is now being formed, and another one is just at the beginning. It will take one or more years to be completely filled, but it will take three months to dig it and after the first rain, it can be used. Without pumps, engines, concrete, hi-technology, and costs with electrical energy…….. Add some fish naturally living, without artificial feeding, and all the ecosystem of the lake is self generating!

Many portuguese people visit Tamera and wonder………an oasis in the middle of the desert! They now have a project for 1000 lakes in Alentejo. And the project is an example for the entire world, as a key for water, as basis of world’s peace. If there is water, there is food, wood, heat, life... for everyone!

And I am even more amazed of how are all these connecting…………………... how many wars, how many misunderstandings and fights with neighbors could be avoided?
Certainly many of them, I think, in my assumed foolishness!