Rumblings & Ramblings

I haven’t had a chance to write about two Sundays ago, even though I keep meaning to. It was a jammed packed 12 hours!

Dave, fellow Dig In-er, picked me up at the Peterborough bus station and together we drove to Douro-Dummer, where this tri-country youth food sovereignty conference was taking place. The conference was held at this lovely cottage country inn on the water. Delegates from Canada, Jamaica and Nicaragua were coming together for a week to work on developing a collaborative policy paper, with both a global north and south perspective, to present to their respective governments on how to tackle food security issues in their countries and communities.

This ambitious project put on by Jamaica Self-Help and Horizons of Friendship is exciting, and we were lucky to be invited to do the opening workshop. As someone who is just slowly getting into public speaking and presenting, and who gets terribly, terribly nervous speaking in front of people, especially adults, I had a lot of fun. It definitely helped that Dave was my partner in crime. Our workshop, was an extension of the previous Dig In workshop we put on back in November as well as a nod to the Stomach This youth conference I helped Meal Exchange with back in March. Overall, we seemed to get a really good reception and it was interesting to hear the differing view points from the Jamaican and Nicaraguan in contrast to the Canadian delegates with regards to their visions of what a food sovereign society and community looks like from a local and global perspective. The Jamaican delegates for example had a vision of food sovereignty that included more involvement from the government.

Getting there was just as fun, as I have never heard of Douro-Dummer and have never seen that part of the province, saw my first wild turkey which we almost ran over (the turkey was walking so slow and seemed so unfazed that I think we could have just caught it with our bare hands and little trickery), passed  and celebrated the scary 30, 000 mile/kilometre audometre in Dave’s  car(nothing happened), “hey, look a unicorn!”, ate pistachio nuts of which many fell into the crooks and crannies of the old vehicle for Dave to find later when he goes on his road trip up North, and Dave is just good company all around.

I await the outcome of the conference and project. Will anything concrete come out of it?