The Climate Compliance Conference F E B R U A R Y
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Super GAIA Teams INSIDE THIS ISSUE: Super GAIA Teams
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Teaching in North 2 Leeward government schools Get to know one of the GAIA students
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On our way being self-sustainable
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The Biogas Project is working
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Contact
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New year, new beginning with new ideas, projects, challenges and new people! The next GAIA team will start in March 2013 and already some students arrived to St. Vincent and working as action team to fundraise for their scholarship. They take a big part to make Richmond Vale Academy self-sustainable and by learning by doing they start to get to know the school, the smaller projects and the everyday life at Richmond Vale. The new students are Olimpia from Poland, Elina and Farrukh from Russia, Alexandr from Uzbekistan and
Panella from St. Vincent. In the new year we have lots of aims at the front of us; like in February to make garbage bins out of recycled materials and place them in North Leeward area, build a playground out of used tires in our community garden in Chateaubelair and establish 5 backyard farms in the community. We are going to update the public about our activities in the media, like in the television “Focus North Leeward� or in NBC Radio, when the principal of RVA, Stina Herberg will give more interviews.
The Climate Compliance Conference - 10 years for GAIA - The book about the GAIA project
The current and the next international GAIA Team happily with the new Climate Compliance Conference books
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Teaching in North Leeward government schools
Teaching in Troumaca about nutrition and healthy lifestyle
We started our teaching – project in November 2012 and now, in February of 2013 we are almost finished all the 5 lessons in most of the schools. We had a long brake because of the winter holidays but we started with new energy into the New Year. Our experiences have been very different: As most of the members of the current GAIA – Team come from Europe, the first contact with the education system has been surprising and sometimes also exciting. We tried to teach with methods that were unknown to most of the students like making Power-
Point Presentations and using videos as an important component of our lessons. It was nice to see that the students liked these and were also really interested in what we taught, such as recycling, global warming or organic gardening. The teaching itself was a nice way to get to know the younger generation of North Leeward. In the end of this teaching period we have the Trash Pick-Up Co mpetition among all the seven schools we teach in. The students will not only be asked to collect the trash around their school and in their communities to make
the villages the cleanest in whole North Leeward, but also to make something creative out of this trash. The winner will receive money prize for sports or music equipment. The GAIA – Team is looking forward for this competition and hoping that the students will come up with some nice ideas. We saw the feedback that the kids and teenagers gave us and we can be proud to say that we left some ideas and new ways of thinking amongst them about an environmentally friendly way of living and the awareness of nature. Karolina from Germany
Kristiana in the GAIA Kids Club
GAIA Team in action - teaching about global warming and climate change
Get to know one of the GAIA students My name is Kristiana Doktore, I am nineteen years old and I come from a little country in Europe called Latvia. I just graduated from high school and came here to gather some new experiences before starting university and also to finally decide what exactly I want to THE
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study. During these six months in St.Vincent I have learned a lot about the local culture, nature, people living in poverty and many other things. Our team managed to build a biogas plant and develop our own organic garden, which is a good example for self sustainably in this country. This experience
definitely has a big impact on me and my plans for the future as it has radically changed my perspective. I could now see myself studying Environmental studies and afterwards implementing some of the things I learned here in my home country to make it a clean country too.
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On our way being self-sustainable
Rainwater collection system for our organic garden
One of our main goals is at Richmond Vale Academy to be self-sustainable. We would like to show a good example in the community, build the base of a Climate Centre and secure our everyday life. For this reason we are expanding our animal farm and slaughter more of the animals. Nowadays we have sheep and pigs, but we start setting up a chicken house in the next week to provide us from eggs and meat. We have our own organic garden and we water the vegetables, herbs and fruits with rainwater. In 2013 our big project is to expand our rainwater collection system to be able the use rainwater in the bathrooms, wash our clothes, so it means we will have public water only in our kitchen. Much more are coming, like solar panel on our roof, but everything step by step!
Happy life, happy pigs at RVA!
We put up our GAIA CLUB sign at the community garden in Chateaubelair
Our Biogas Project is working! After waiting for 42 days we finally started feeding the biogas plant - and were too excited to wait to buy a blender so unfortunately it got clogged immediately. So when we unclogged it we decided to wait for the blender this time and since then we have been feeding it every morning without any
problems. We put leftovers like porridge, pasta, soup; beans etc into the blender with a lot of water, mix it with some of the slurry and feed it into the inlet pipe. The gas tank has now risen up half way so soon we will be able to use our separate biogas stove for cooking every day.
The first try of our own biogas - we have a special stove for it in the kitchen
Richmond Vale Academy
Website:
Chateaubelair Post Office
http://www.richmondvaleacademy.org/
St.Vincent & The Grenadines
Like us on Facebook:
Eastern Caribbean
RichmondValeAcademy
Phone: (784) 458-2255
E-mail address: kata@richmondvale.org
Thank you Mountain Top sponsoring the Climate Compliance Conference !!!