Sustainability and the Environment: "Revenge of the Internships"

Wednesday, February 17th, will forever be known as "Internship Day 2: The Revenge of the Internships." At least to me. On this day the adventurers woke up, rubbed their eyes, and got super bummed that yesterday was over, because they'd had such a great time learning about the internships. But then they brightened up because they remembered that today, they would get to go around and hear about the rest of the internships, which made them super happy!

The first place they were heading was the bank, right up there near Taco Taco, you know? Now you've probably passed right by this bank a hundred times and wondered what all that cool mosaic art on the wall was all about. Well today, these adventurers learned that this cool art wall is the creation of local artist Ana Ovares and some past CIEE student interns. 

Chandler's looking cool against the art wall 

Well Ana was out of town probably doing something cool and artistic, so her daughter came by to talk about the project with the students. 

Here's Ana's daughter explaining all about how cool her mom is 

So what do you think this internship is about? Well, I'll tell you. Ana's theme for this semester is "Agua es Vida, Vida es agua," and she is hoping to decorate the wall with art that emphasises the importance of water as a life-giving and soul-replenishing resource. The idea is, kids from the local schools will produce a lot of nifty artwork, and then the intern will choose and mount selected pieces on attractive display boards. Doesn't sound like a real bad gig to me!

Art wall / bank wall 

After the students had taken sufficient ganders at the art wall beside the bank, they walked back up to the study center for a cool surprise. Even though Ana was out of town, she'd pre-recorded a little message about her project for the students to get to watch. This was like something straight out of Terminator, or from Jurassic Park when the little John Hammond is walking around on the screen. But it was good because it let the students get an idea of Ana's personality and general stoke on the project, and there weren't any Skynet-type incidents of any kind. 

Ana talks to the students through the wonders of technology, disregarding space and time 

After that, the students heard a presentation from Felipe Negrini Sanjuan about landscape transects planning. Now this stuff can be kind of complicated, but it basically boils down to the fact that you can find beauty anywhere in the world, and you can also find unattractive places. Felipe did a presentation about how there are some pretty unattractive places in Monteverde and Santa Elena, particularly when the unnatural environment makes no effort to blend in with the natural environment. Felipe wanted to see what we could do to fix this. 

Your typical passionate Spaniard

 Here's some of the not-so-pretty places

Felipe showed the students the different transects between Santa Elena and the Monteverde reserve, and talked about a few of the places which he thought could stand to be beautified a little bit. The interns for this project would work with Felipe to create and submit a proposal for the entire Santa Elena-Monteverde transect, including blueprints, drawings, maps, and explanatory texts, in an effort to beautify the impact of humankind on its environment. 

Seems cool, doesn't it? 

Next, the adventurers went up to the garden to hear a presentation from Orlando Calvo, also known as Fish. Fish was organising three different internships up in the garden right above the study center. The first internship was focused on creating a cultural heritage garden to bottleneck the loss of local agricultural knowledge by preserving heritage plants, essential information on the, and recipes used to prepare them.  

Bet you didn't know there was such an awesome little garden right out here, did you? 

The second internship Fish was overseeing was to create a sustainable chicken coop at the study center. In case you didn't know, the TAs eat a lot of eggs, so this would be super helpful for them, and would also set a good example for the community. A student from years past began this project already, but it's still a little unfinished, and so it'll be a great one for one of these cool kids to try to finish. 

 Tessa's not certain she isn't being lured into a trap

Here's Fish teaching from inside the chicken coop, and Hector teaching outside the chicken coop 

Yeah, Morgan's getting really good at spotting that camera 

The last internship Fish is overseeing is the implementation of hanging vertical gardens. See, the neighbours put up this new fence and tore down all the plants that were demarcating the demilitarised zone between the properties, so these crafty eco-warriors decided they should hang some gardens off their side of this fancy new fence. Fish explained that you can use invasive bamboo as hanging, segmented pots for plants, as well as plastic bottles. If that ain't sustainability, I don't know what is. 

After Fish's presentation was done, Karen waved everybody over to the carrot patch and had everybody help her thin out the carrots, which meant that everybody got to eat a few, and that was pretty great. 

The carrots that Leah and Sadia picked have a sense of humor

And then it was time for the very last internship of them all. This one took place at the Monteverde Friends School, which is an old school that the Quaker founders of Monteverde formed way back in the day. The internship supervisor at the school is Marcela Morales, and she was super stoked to get to meet these cool adventurers. 

 Here's Karen introducing Marcela in the old-timey Quaker meeting hall

The Friends School is trying to become Carbon-neutral, and they're hoping that two interns from the Sustainability program will be able to help them on their noble quest. This will help them serve as a model for other local businesses and organisations, but they have a lot of work ahead of them for sure. So they need interns to research the concept of carbon emissions from vehicular transportation, hold conversations and interviews, and design and implement surveys to understand the current method of transportation to and from school, and how that might be altered to achieve carbon neutrality. 

The Quakers built this hall with no nails and no screws, isn't that pretty sweet? 

And that was it. With all the internships presented and laid out before them, the adventurers were gonna have to go home and try to rank their favourites, getting ready for the most important draft pick of their semester. Who knows what they're going to choose....

Boy, what a cliffhanger. 

 I kinda like these Quakers