An Amazing Letter From a Cultivator in Syria...

Not to sound too impressed with ourselves, but we get wonderful letters from happy customers and devoted fans all the time. And we love to read them! This one, though...this one brought tears to our eyes:

"Hello, Paul.

Fungi helped us to be a live! yes... read the following deeply...

I've a fascinating story about using Mushroom as a way to help starved people to live.

I had lived in a besieged area called Ester-Ghouta (EG) ( near Damascus, Syria) for 6 years, no food supply, no electricity, bombardments were all through those 6 years.

Fear, hunger, all the bad things which come with war.

When i was a child i remember my drawings of Mushroom. Mushroom images were in some journals fascinated me, I tried to draw them on some papers because they were amazing creature for me.

I didn't notice at first that my hidden love of mushroom could solve the starvation in EG.

Stamet's ideas of using mushrooms to save the world were in my mind through those years, and they guide me to help people, my family and myself.

Once a day I noticed there are a lot of Cellulose materials since EG is an agricultural land, those materials (Wood, straw, leaves, ... etc) could be a good substrate for Mushroom culturing to provide new food in the market, full of nutritive nutrients specially proteins, vitamins ( Vit-D indeed is important because most of people's time is in the basements).

I dedicated my self to help people with some novel solutions using my experience in Mycology. For 1 and half a year I was trying collecting samples from EG's nature, culturing them in the lab to prepare spawn bags. I failed a lot of times, my failures still going until I succeed in September 2015. My first success was in culturing Pleorutus spp. then i progress to prepare Spawn Bags to make it available for people to culture it in their basements.

Day after day.... no more lands were available for agriculture, so more attention had made to Mushroom farming as a way to eat and work.

My successes were done at "Nwat center for scientific studies" which is a NGO center I had established with some academic freinds for conducting scientific solutions for community problems. The mushroom story was one of the solutions we provided there.

Through 2 years after our success we teach more than 1000 men and women how to culture Mushroom inside their houses (Specially in basements since they're safer places ).

Remember here the war is going on, aircraft missiles, mortars, chemical weapons, martyrs ... However, we keep going until we did it.

Our working continue to find candidate strains and save them in our bank for further studies ( and we still trying saving them).

At 21 Mar. 2018 Assad regime after 37 days of pursuing a scorched-earth policy to annihilate the Syrian people, forced us to migrate to north.

Now I'm doing my best to save the strains which gave us some life.

We share our story with you because we helped our people to feat their hunger by using Fungi, which is the "Mutual friend" between us.

For me I'm fond of Fungi and I'm working hard to prove it as a tool to save the world, and my story one of them.

I am planning to teach more people about fungi.... solving some problems and provide solutions for people.

Also I believe I'll find some novel strains with special properties which could help some of the world problems, maybe one of my strains could have it.

We made a campaign to teach people how to grow it with help CanDo charity, you can watch this video to know more about our success ( We borrow quotes from Paul Ted talk ^_^)

That's my story.

Thank you"

We immediately reached out to the author (whose name and likeness we have withheld for safety) to offer him both our heartfelt best wishes and our material support in his efforts. While the CanDo campaign for this project has expired, we are encouraging him to start another in order to keep their project momentum rolling. If another campaign is started, rest assured, we will let people know.

The sheer power of people determined to help and nurture each other to transcend terrible circumstances is overwhelming.

Friend, we wish you and yours safety, peace and prosperity.

Thank you all for helping to keep the Mycelium Running!