Volunteering at Mier
Mier (Dutch for ant) is centered in one of the most suburbanized areas of the world: Flanders, Belgium. 50% of Flanders is concrete. The rest are lawns. Our mission is to renaturalize these ecological wastelands. We turn grey into Green! If you want to give us a helping hand on this mission, we welcome you with open arms to become our family-member for a while.
Mier is host for WWOOF, HelpX, Workaway.
If you are a member of one of these organisations you can join us under following conditions:
- We ask you to help us 4 days out of 7 and 7 hours a day. If you want, you can do more hours. You can't do less than that.
- In return you get a free bed in our guest house and free food and drinks. We cook for you at least every day you're working. During your free days, you might have to take care of your food yourself from time to time.
- You must have a travellers-insurance if you want to join us.
-We ask you to bring seeds of edible/medicinal plants of your region. The seeds that we collect from all over the world will be planted in our food forest or green lung in our house and will produce food or teas for us and all volunteers to come in the future.
Other things you need to know about us:
- First thing you should do is checking out our website in your native language to get a good idea of what we're doing.
- We are a young couple in our 30'ies with some pretty radical ideas. We come along best with other young people who also have radical ideas.
- We speak Dutch, French and English.
- We're pretty deep ecologists and do mostly 'heavy' conversations.
- We grow our food organically, small scale. We try to live as self sufficient as possible. This means that we have an abundancy of food in the summer period and that we survive on dried beans and cabages during winter. So no wanking about this when you're staying during winter periods.
- We are vegetarians, you won't get any meat!
- We are against food industries. The food you get contains mostly unprocessed, honest organic or fair-trade ingredients.
- We started our organization only 3 years ago and we are in full development. This means that you can influence our future direction just by thinking along with us during your stay.
- All the things you get to see at our site might make you enthousiastic about it. That's good! But you also must know that all of this is the result of very hard and mostly physical labour. You're gonna be tired after a full day of work!
- Most of our work is outside. You should be prepared to work in all weather conditions.
- You also must be mentally strong enough. Working in the rain is no fun.
- You have to be able to ride a bicycle. Bikes are our main transport.
- Our guest rooms contain 4 double beds and 1 single bed. You might have to share the guest room with other volunteers.
All this might sound a little bit scary for some of you. If it doesn't you should come over. Most people with similar ideas have a blast overhere!