Education Costa Rica Project #5866

Help Us Fund our Eco School in Costa Rica

by Action Change (Formerly GVI Trust)

Project Report | Jan 3, 2020
Music to our ears

By Sonya Danchik | Program Manager

Community Fundraiser

Dear Supporters

Firstly Happy New Year to you all!

May we continue to learn and grow, be grateful for every new day given and keep kindness and love for one another in our hearts.

December is the end of our scholastic year here in Costa Rica, so it is bitter sweet as we reflect the year, welcome summer and celebrate and say goodbye to graduating students. As always we had an informal graduation and end of year green event, open to family, friends and the community, with singing, dancing, tears, laughter and a yummy potluck lunch.

We also hosted a very successfully cultural community fundraiser in November for Día de los Muertos. The students helped make the decorations and we did our best to transform the school into a little Mexican village. We had talented local musicians perform Mexican music for us to enjoy and our bellies where filled with delish food made with all our parents collaboration. All staff and friends volunteered to work the Saturday evening - washing dishes, serving food and drinks, painting faces and generally making sure everyone was safe and having fun. Its fun to host these sustainable events were we come together as a community and at the end of the night there is barely any rubbish.

Our scholastic calendar starts mid January and we are looking forward to welcoming lots of new faces. We hope 2020 will bring you all joy!

Without the support from all our supporters none of this could be possible so from the bottom of our hearts we really appreciate it.

Only Love,

Costa Rica Mal Pais

Community Fundraiser

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Oct 7, 2019
Growing at a Rate of Knots

By Sonya Danchik | Program Manager

Dear Supporters,

We have been very busy in the garden this rainy season, the students said their favorite project was our newly upscaled playground. All hands large and small helped with this fun and muddy project - days of transplanting little shovels in tiny hands from our fertile soil pile, we even planted in the rain!

We fixed the broken slides with rubber and glue and added more chairs with broken legs into the ground and lots of old tyres - to retain the soil and also for balance walking. We are all enjoying and feel proud of the finished results!

September is an important month in Costa Rica as the 15th of September is Independence Day. We held a community presentation to celebrate. We worked with some traditional dancers from Mal Pais School, who helped us with choreography and also danced with us for our presentation. We enjoyed another green event with a collaborative lunch of traditional food and no single use plastic. It was a wonderful day sharing Costa Rican culture.

As part of our environmental classes we introduced the students through multimedia to Greta Thunberg and student climate strikes. The students who are already very motivated to care for nature and understand the true importance of trees, decided they also wanted to be part of the climate strikes. Like Greta and millions of other students they don't understand why we adults haven't already made saving the planet a priority. They designed lots of posters with reused poster card, cardboard, markers and crayons. Carefully thinking about what they wanted to write. We practiced our chants: "No more pollution, be the solution...Plant more trees...no more fossil fuel...be kind to nature..." Then they were ready! We started in our Rancho and marched our way out the school gates, loud and proud!

It's time for change! Be the change you wish to see...education is for life!

As always thanks for your continued support, much gratitude to you all.

Only Love,

Sonya Danchik

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Jul 10, 2019
Educate and we can grow greener together!

By Sonya Danchik | Founder

Dear Supporters,

We are now enjoying Costa Rican half-term, after a very eventful and successful first 6 months of our scholastic calendar. We have welcomed 3 new scholarship students and hosted 2 service projects. Our student initiative beach cleanups are now constant and students are happy to tell us each day how much rubbish they have collected in the afternoon from our local beaches. Our BYO Birthday party initiative is inspiring the community to refuse single use plastic and local birthday parties have become Green Events. Our next project is to bring awareness to our local supermarkets who still provide plastic bags for shoppers.

We have been busy composting and planting and our student garden is almost ready to harvest our tomatoes and herbs. We have also planted a lot of fruit trees from seed and the students are really starting to grasp the concept of nurture and growth. Gardening can teach us so many life skills.

In June for Pride month, we celebrated diversity and choice, students decided they had the right to love who ever the choose...love is love! We finished the month with our annual Rainbow march. We also celebrated Earth Day, Ocean Day, Environment Day and Father's Day to name a few!

My son along with other older students from Futuro Verde spent the beginning of their school holidays volunteering at Romelia National Wildlife Refuge our local turtle hatchery, digging and filtering sand for nesting sites. Hard work, but very rewarding. Unfortunately it is still common place for turtle eggs to be dug up for sale.

Our town of Cobano diversified sports funding this year and added their first swim team - open to all students under 19yrs. I was asked to be the swim coach and I'm happy to announce that after many early morning practices these past 6 months our team qualified and is currently participating in the Juegos Deportivos Nacionales/National Sports Games, against the best swimmers in Costa Rica. Yesterday we took home 2 silver medals and hope to collect more in the next few days of events, putting our little town on the map for swimming. Which will hopefully inspire and encourage future students to join our team. Swimming is a great sport to maintain good health and in Costa Rica its also a real opportunity for a University scholarship.

Looking forward to new opportunities and projects, as always much gratitude to you all for your continued support in our education project.

We are the change we hope to see...

Only Love

Sonya Danchik

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