Some students also spend time at ARI's smaller Philippine campus near Santa Rita, Negros. Every year about 35 men and women from various Christian denominations gather at the institute to learn through classroom lectures and by putting theory into practice by performing daily chores necessary to maintain a self-sufficient farm. Living a simple life, participants grow vegetables and rice, raise poultry for eggs and meat and care for pigs and cows. They even study fish farming, among other techniques, and learn how to reduce the need for outside resources and chemicals that pollute the land. They learn about such things as compost farming and collecting native microorganisms to improve the soil.
Participants also learn the dignity of manual labor, the key ingredient of life on the farm.
They think it is below their dignity to take a shovel or a broom to scrape up chicken or pig dung. In this painful process of having our own conventional images shattered, we find ourselves emerging with new images of ourselves, of leadership, life and culture. All this happens as we work together to produce and share food and other resources. Louisville, Ky. is, there are people who care and who are in partnership with us, and that's important above and beyond the value of the actual dollar. The sense of being in partnership with people around the world has real meaning for us.