Working with the next Generation - Students

We have been working hard to get everything ready before we leave, and since we are involved in many things, sometimes this can get to be pretty intense. On Friday, we did a lot of things, and one of them was a meeting with a group of teachers and the rector of local highschool Instituto Educativo Isidro Parra. My wife graduated from this High School, so you could say its her 'Alma Mater'.

We showed up early, before 7:30am.

They have a lot of underutilized spaces, and in recent years their outdoors programs have been lacking, some have fallen by the wayside, but really they need some help integrating these activities into their academic program.

This fits well with our organization @quintaesencia, where we have established a relationship with the Middlebury Institute for International Studies, who will be sending a group here next year. As part of this project, we are reaching out to some local institutions, including Isidro Parra.

Our job was to look for win-win (win) integrations with this local actor, which was not hard to find. They have a great big campus, but much of it has been underutilized recently, as class sizes have diminished and education budgets along with them. But that doesn't mean that they don't want to make the best use of the resources they have, just that they need some help with logistics and organization.

Here is @ecoinstante with the Biology Teacher and the Communications Teacher, both of which are really excited by the possibilities. The only question was if there would be enough students interested, but I told them that they shouldn't worry to much about that.

As I made my way out into the Physical Education class, I was slowly than suddenly swarmed by students asking me questions, in both english and spanish. Where did I come from? What was I doing? All sorts of questions, I even shared with them my blog so they could follow along.

In fact, these students were very interested in the program, especially when I told them that part of the environmental education was sharing what they were doing in 'redes sociales' with an emphasis on #web3. This is something that the students were more interested in than even the teachers, and we are very excited to be doing an integrated program, plant a tree, but also document it and monitor it, and document the monitoring. Something tells me that something I have been dreaming about for years - using #HIVE to improve sustainable development, will soon be becoming very strong in our small town.

We had a few other stops on Friday, running around to leave everything prepared ahead of time, and I grabbed the below selfie just before 9am. Keeping busy is an interesting strategy, the pressure actually seems to help me get even more stuff done, so many I shouldn't complain so much.

Boy, but somedays it just feels nice to not travel anywhere, to just stay on the farm and get multiple things done, but in one place.

But then yesterday, we passed the whole day without internet access. It was the first time in a while, and while I got a ton of farm work done, it felt weird, not being able to 'document it'. But honestly, I know its good to not worry so much about my ratio trades and my tokens, to take a day off is good for the mind (and my eyes).

Let's keep up the hard work, but not forget to enjoy the path along the way. There is a lot to do, and good things are happening, thank the Lord.

Freedom and Friendship