Week 15: Monday, December 4 – Sunday, December 10, 2023

Dear friends and family,

Another week has passed in the beautiful town of Neblinas, and I can officially say I have been in site for a whole month! One down, 23 to go. But, in all honesty, I’m just super excited to see what the next 23 months bring — adventure, creativity, new experiences, long-lasting change on the part of myself and on the part of the community. This is just the beginning, and I know there will be lots of chapters ahead, so thank you for continuing on with me while I am on this journey.

This week brought with it a few exciting opportunities, mostly related to working with the schools in the community. On Tuesday, Rayanne and I went to the primaria (elementary school) and the secundaria (middle school) to speak with the teachers and get a sense of their interest and willingness to have us work with the kids come January.

Well, I’m happy to report that starting in January after winter break, Rayanne and I will be full- fledged maestras de ciencias ambientales (environmental science teachers).

In the primaria, we will be starting off with basic environmental science classes and classes with themes related to the Peace Corps’ goals: namely, solid waste management (how to identify and properly separate organics from inorganics, recycling, creating ecobricks); water and soil management (planting trees, gardening, capturing rainwater); and biodiversity conservation (attracting pollinators with pollinator gardens, identifying local flora and fauna). I’m personally very exciting to start teaching the local kids about sustainability and natural resource management and climate change and all the things I like to nerd out about.

In the secundaria, we have also been asked to come in and work on projects with the students. Similar projects to the ones mentioned above, but the secundaria has a good amount of open space, so we are particularly excited to see how much of the land we can convert into a community garden, which as I mentioned a few weeks back, is a theme that we really want to focus on here in the community.

We’ve heard several times now that the people in the community are somewhat difficult to motivate to dedicate their time to projects outside of their daily lives, but hopefully with engagement from the students (the children), we can motivate more people to get engaged and want to start up some of the same projects that we will be initiating in the schools.

On the same theme of education and working with students, this past Thursday, Rayanne and I went up to the colegio (high school) (and when I say up, I mean up, because the high school is located at the top of a giant hill) to do a few activities with the students.

*Side note: As I may have mentioned in one of my past newsletters, the Peace Corps has asked that in the first three months of service (the day we move to our sites until our first in-service

training in February) we really focus on getting to know the people and the community and gaining a better understanding of what people prioritize and value. To help aid in that goal, there are a set of activities called Participatory Analysis for Community Action (PACA) tools, that help guide and build our understanding of community knowledge and ideas.

Okay, so, all that being said, on Thursday when we went to the colegio, we asked all 50 of the high schoolers (10th, 11th, and 12th graders) to form groups and draw a map of their community (Neblinas), using a PACA tool called “community mapping.” In five groups (three groups of girls, two groups of boys), the students created their community maps, identifying the most important buildings, resources, institutions, and landmarks. After mapping out the general outline of the community, we asked them to mark the most important of the most important places in the community and mark the frequency in which they visit those places. Lastly, we asked the students to write down what they would like to see change in the community or what they think they might be missing in their community that we could perhaps help change.

While simple, this activity was, first, a great way for us to understand the most important places in the community through a gender and youth lens (we split the groups by gender to see if there were any stark differences in perception, and of course we were working with younger individuals in the community, which demonstrated to us what the youth value), and, second, a great way for Rayanne and I to introduce ourselves to the students and sew the seed (no pun intended) of perhaps a bigger collaboration with the high school.

So, if you hadn’t noticed already, this week was a highly education-focused week. But that’s a good thing. Because one half of our objective as Climate Change Awareness and Action Peace Corps Volunteers or CCAA PCVs is to educate people in our communities about climate change and the importance of the natural environment. And what better place to start than with the youth, who, as it has been proven in studies, are likely to go home and tell their parents about what they learned and transfer the information onto more people. Fun fact, it is said that teenage daughters make the most change in their households, especially on the part of their fathers. So, to anyone who says it’s a parent’s job to educate their children, this is absolutely true, but your children are educating you, too, whether you know it or not.

Lastly, I thought I’d take a minute to tell you more about my friend and fellow volunteer, Rayanne, whom I’ve now mentioned a number of times, but have not told you about directly.

Rayanne Foertsch is from Baltimore, Maryland. She is 22 years old. And for the past 4 years, she has lived and studied in Barcelona, Spain. She is worldly and already very accustomed to living in another country — since the age of 15 she has spent months at a time living in different countries, the first of which was Japan. And I’m happy to say that as far as volunteer partners go, I am so grateful to have been chosen to work with her. She is friendly and calm and generally free from anxiety, except for her extreme fear of bugs, which she is working on — kinda difficult to have a phobia of bugs in a cloud forest...haha. But anyway, that’s what I’ll share about Rayanne.

And if you have any questions about her or the work we’re doing or the community or anything else, please feel free to reach out.

I hope you all have a beautiful Sunday!

Love, Ilana

(And if you want to follow my life more closely and/or see cool pictures of bugs and flowers, you can follow me on Instagram @ilana.hirschfeld and @ilanainthecloudforest)