The open house will be a meeting place, a place for creating, giving and living, where we push the limits of our relationships to ourselves, others and land, moving towards more and more openness. The house will be located in communities that we will become part of, that we will work in, and will include anyone who passes by or stays in it. The open house will be a place that is local and without boundaries.
In the open house community activities that centre community's interests and knowledges will take place, while we constantly talk about whether and how our activities lead to more openness. We want to open up spaces, actions and relationships that the present dominant systems (political, economic and social) are closing up, by building on different people's experiences and knowledges. We wish to live without depending on the systems, be they state or corporate, by building upon and creating relationships of giving without expectations of 'fair' transaction, return or barter.
The open house is NOT a charity, community centre, commune, ashram, or environmental getaway. It is an experiment, a process, in specific places, with people from each place leading the activities and conversations, constantly talking to more and more people, friends, neighbours, acquaintances and strangers, for more places like this to be explored, undertaken. To put into practice an imagination of another world.
The open house is for everyone, but no one is indispensable to it. It will belong to no one, but is everyone's, especially the community's where it will be set up. It has no leaders, people share ideas and activities. People will agree and disagree but move towards more openness. We will learn and act based on experiences of the past, critiques of the present and imaginative explorations in sustainable and community living.
In the open house we will have activities such as open kitchen, open library, open internet, community radio, story telling and story collection, and many others as more people become involved, using appropriate and sustainable technology and knowledges. In our kitchen anyone can eat, cook, give and take. In our library we will get, read, write and make books, and collect, archive and make stories with the people in the community, in oral, written, audio, video and digitalized forms. For open internet we will run open operating systems and software on used and recycled computers. In the community radios, and in many other spaces and ways, we will express ourselves, our ideas, relationships, histories, present and future creatively.
In the ecological open house that we will ourselves build, with local materials and knowledges, we will ideally have: one large living room, one large kitchen, one large multi-bunked room for people who want to pass by, visit or stay, one large resource room, ten bedrooms for those of us who want to be there from the 'beginning', three washing areas and three dry toilets. Outside the house there will be a well, a medicinal herb garden, a vegetable garden, fruit trees, a farm, an animal farm, a fish tank, and a compost area. In the open house solar and pedal power will be used, along with built-in water purification.
For the open house to be built we need land. While communities or individual people can give us the land in different places (India, South Sudan, Bolivia), in Oaxaca we will be buying the land (for more explanation, hear a community radio interview in Toronto with Erick and Deepa at http://previous.ncra.ca/exchange/dspProgramDetail.cfm?programID=105588). And, Oaxaca is where all of us are able to come together to start the open house.
