Initiative and will, as simple as that....

The last months have been hectic! With police strike and carnival substituting each other -visits from far away, robbery and much more on the personal frontier happening - February went so quick I barely noticed it. At least, due to the leap year, I’ll get an extra day tomorrow before March comes tumbling in.

I have done three interviews with people involved in the politics, implementation and management of Environmental Education in this city. And I have visited one of my cases; a school situated in the outskirts of the city, up on a hug hill with a fantastic view out over the Bahia de todos os Santos which is the name of the bay that characterizes the capital of Bahia.

The school will be a perfect example of an institution that started implementing EA on a wing, a project initiated by some enthusiastic teachers trying to make a difference. They have done what they had the possibility to do, nothing more and nothing less and they succeeded to turn a school which was near closedown in 2007 to turn around and gain support from the surrounding community and parents again.

The difficulties and challenges that this school deals with every day are breath taking.  The school may be situated on a nice spot and the sounding houses may be fancy but 98 % of the students comes from neighborhoods further away, living in poverty, in large families dependent upon governmental cash transfer program such as Bolsa Familia, with parents with no- or only a little education. It is a rough reality, which takes hold of them early, causing a high mortality rate, especially among young boys. Girls goes through sufferings and difficulties related to physical and fiscal, some times sexual abuse at home and is often forced to work, basically as slaves, with household shores from a young age. It is not hard to imagine how difficult it must be to administer a schools where almost every child have been physically stressed by it sounding since birth.

The initiative to implement Environmental Education transversally in the schools every day functioning have made the school a safe house. A beautiful school garden where the children, while learning math, got to mark out circles and triangles in order to create the flowerbeds an where the crops are used in the school lunches served. The school works a lot with communication in order for the children to reproduce what has been learnt, both for their own learning as well as for the solidarity in sharing knowledge and experiences with others. The school has been host for large encounters with other schools wanting to learn how to integrate EA in teaching and held in 2011 a large conference where many schools from the interior of Bahia participated with the purpose to strengthen the basis of education for sustainability and quality of life.

I’m looking forward to initiate my interviews with teachers and students and learn their experiences upon interaction, collaboration and relations with the community outside the schools walls!