We turn grey into Green!

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.

 http://mier.be

We take volunteers under the following conditions:

- We ask you to help us 5 days out of 7, 5 to 6 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.

- We purify our grey water with plants. Check the products you normally use (soaps, shampoos, shaving gels,...). Most of them are petrol-based and toxic for our ecosytem. Please, bring only bio-degradable products.

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 speak Dutch, French and English.

- 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 whining 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.

- 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!

How to get to us by public transport?

The adress is Kokerijstraat 41, 9310 Meldert (Aalst). There are several ways to reach us:

Option 1: Take the train from Brussels to Aalst. Take bus 42 or 44 and step off at 'Walburgaweg' (in Meldert). This bus stops right in front of our house: Kokerijstraat 41. Very easy, but the bus isn't riding very frequently.

Option 2: Take the train from Brussels tot Aalst. Take bus 41 and step off at 'Koeisteertweg' (in Moorsel). At the bus stop you will see the bank office 'Belfius'. Next to that building there's a cobble stone street called 'Klaarhaagstraat'. Walk down that street. The street becomes 'Kokerijstraat' after a while. You will find our house nr 41 on your left hand side. It's about 20 min walking.

Option 3: Take bus 214 from Brussels Nord to Aalst. Step off at 'Hekelgem Den Beer'. This bus stop is at the crossing point of the N9 with the Fosselstraat. Walk for about 45 min.

Bus schedules: http://www.delijn.be/index.htm

Train schedules: http://www.belgianrail.be/en/Default.aspx