Loushuiyuan Tea Cooperative: Community, solidarity and how to speak without words.

I was charmed by Manyingtai the first time I stepped on its muddy terrain, through its jungle paths, into its people's old wooden huts. Technologically simple, vastly self-sufficient lives go on their peaceful, serene daily hardships. To carve out this small plateau village, 1000 meters high, from its most pernicious but also most generous primitive inhabitant, that is the forest, certainly was no easy task. Generations after generations have endured silent hindrances, living hardships, still to this day. Alex Witherspoon, my colleague and friend at Hubei University for Nationalities, in Enshi, two and a half hours away, introduced this place to me, asked if I was willing to be part of this beautiful, a bit fool, slowly improving, life and economy project. Here we are, at the Cooperative he contributed to found four years ago. Now we produce, in mostly commonly managed plantations, the tea that is processed at the Loushuiyuan factory, downhill, where the river symbolically and actually flows. The dividends of the sales are then redistributed among each and every household in Manyingtai and surroundings. Volunteers from around the planet are hosted in a rented, old, wooden house with typical Tujia ethnic architecture, which is quite comfortable, immersed in a totally pristine envronment. So everyone can contribute to this social experiment, focusing on a different kind of living: the economy of the gift, of sharing, of solidarity, of mutual help for everyone's profit. With the great figure of PingShan, the Peace Mountain, the Great Buddha of Compassion, towering in front and above our heads, wherever we happen to be.