Home Again

We had a good wrap-up conference back in Chicago and now I am in Minnesota relaxing and preparing for the school year. I haven’t talked much about our actual project, so to summarize:

Our project was titled “Seeds of Knowledge: A Tree Planting Initiative at Rajpura Primary School.” We worked with in a small government school, grades 1 through 5, facilitating daily lessons focused on the environment. Speakers came from the community itself, like one woman who worked at a tree nursery, and also from our NGO, the Foundation for Ecological Security. Then each child got to plant a sapling in the school yard, one of four local species, and take one home to plant near their home. On our follow-up visit we found that all the families had planted the trees. The kids were proud to show us, and many of the family members also got really into it with sturdy thorn fences for protection.

During one of the education days the kids got to color a picture of their tree “all grown up” to motivate them to take care of their sapling so it turns into that large tree. It seemed that most of the kids had only drawn on their small chalkboards before, copying what the teacher had drawn on the board. So they may not have been used to drawing with color, and they certainly weren’t used to having freedom and creativity in their school assignments- most daily activities we observed involved the kids repeating what the teacher said or wrote. At first the kids only copied the tree previously drawn as an example, but as we allowed more time and encouraged them to add things to the drawings, the hesitation dissolved and we ended up with some rainbow-colored trees and full forests.

There’s an unused rainwater harvesting system at the school, so they were able to open that back up again to use for watering the trees. The program was deemed a success both by the school teachers and director, community leaders, and by our NGO, who may do similar programs in other schools. The larger impact of our project, however, lies in the relationships created. Rajpura lies on the border of the wildlife sanctuary that FES is trying to protect, so FES hopes to engage the Rajpura residents in the protection process. In addition to doing the tree project that built trust between FES and Rajpura, we spent four of the seven weeks doing an anthropological study of the lives of the Rajpura people. Both the project and the report we created from what we learned about Rajpura will serve as a basis for FES’s future work there.

Thank you for going along this journey with me! More pictures will be on facebook shortly. It’s been a summer full of learning- not only about community development like I expected but also about food and cooking, politics, religion, healthcare, etc. In our work we talked a lot about sustainability in development and tried to make the benefits of our project directly sustainable, but I think another long lasting thing about this summer will be the relationships I built- with my host family, two good friends from Udaipur, and some of the other interns I got to know.