Tierra de Niños Eco-School

Posted by: Ali | September 15, 2009

Tierra de Niños Eco-School

I know so many people who are going to be excited about this placement.

Okay so today I went to a little village called Huacarpay (which I can NEVER pronounce right), which was so beautiful, it was out in the mountains and overlooking this little lake, it was so cute.

There is a school that we have been working at sometimes but we didn’t have very much information about so I was sent out to visit. Well it is a completely green school. Everything is green. Completely amazing, it totally puts my mom and her friends to shame. The school is called “Tierra de Niños: Vida en mis manos” which doesn’t translate very well but it’s something like “Children’s Land: Life in my hands.”

The Teachers and Me!

Among the many amazing things they do, here are some:

Composting, and a worm farm
SODIS water purification (a technique that requires only a plastic bottle and the sun)
Reusing plastic bags to make things like purses and dolls
Every student has their own plot of land for gardening (and each plot is divided into three sections: one for the student’s consumption, one for sharing with the class, and one for giving back to mother nature)
Reusing bottle caps for things like game pieces and teaching math
Reusing plastic bottles to turn into soap dispensers
Minimizing the amount of paper used for homework by encouraging students to use other materials like tape recorders
Using bits of recycled plastic bottles as labels instead of cardboard or post-it notes
Drinking green tea and wearing green to be more green!

Anyways, it was the coolest school ever. This is a rare example where a strict curriculum hurts schools in Canada because it doesn’t allow them to do cool things like this! If you want to, or know someone who might want to, volunteer here, you can read my writeup on the BaseCamp website.