By Kris Mina

Malate Church and parish community is in the heart of Manila. It is aware of the growing catastrophe being caused by the destruction of the environment all over the Philippines and all over the world. Part of its response is to set up the farming community called Center for Ecozoic Living and Learning (CELL), an hour’s drive from Manila. There in Cavite, Kris and Roberto Mina have done something wonderful to our eyes – they have created a beautiful world which the parishioners and diverse visitors are invited to experience and learn from. Below, Kris tells us about this extraordinary experiment in promoting God’s Kingdom in a novel and vital way.

We are into organic farming, but we do more than just farming. Our family lives and works in an ecological spirituality center, my husband Roberto and I being staff members. We are on land not our own, with an area of 1.2 hectares, a quarter of which is devoted to receiving visitors who stay for a day or overnight. They usually ask at the beginning of their stay, “Where is the farm?” They look for vast rice fields and rows of vegetables and cash crops, and we have nothing much of that. The kind of farming we do is PERMACULTURE, which encourages food to be grown and forest, animals and flowers.