Éva Ekler Nagyistókné is a mother and grandmother, the leader of the Butterfly Developments Team.
As a city girl she spent her summer holidays at her grandparents in a village nearby. The village garden and gardening work became natural to her. She grew accustomed to rural ways that were unknown to her friends being raised in the city. As a university student she was engulfed by the metropolis. Éva started a family in the urban environment and her days living close to nature faded away. However, as her children were born, all the knowledge she had learned in the village as a child started coming back to her.
She remembered that her grandparents used to have a composter – although they simply called it a garbage dump – and they would put the vegetable scraps from the kitchen on it. Only the home-made washing soap was able to remove the hardest stains from their dirty clothes, and people were happy to help each other with baby necessities when new family members were born.
“We passed on knowledge from our family unconsciously, whether it be baking bread, patching socks, growing tomatoes or home cooking and home-made presents,” Éva recalls. “Openness and interest was always a part of my life, and climate change put back the focus on sustainable lifestyle again. Even more so since our first little grandchild was born. Through her I can see that there are so many things endangering our future, and luckily that there is a lot of old knowledge that we can make part of our everyday life today in order to preserve the Earth and the sustainable life of the next generations.”
In her private life Éva is striving to use her knowledge and experience in her living environment. As the association leader of the Butterfly Developments Team she tries to teach the less privileged these placid techniques, which they can use, for instance, to grow vegetables without using chemicals. These vegetables will be available to them as healthy raw materials in the colder months as well.
“We are trying to pass on knowledge that can help them and their wider environments. We have already flapped our butterfly wings in the counties Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén and Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg, and we are hoping that these good examples will be taken up in other counties and towns around the country too.”