In the past couple of days, the whole team has brainstormed for a lesson plan appropriate for the primary school children of Santo Tomas. After making an outline, Sally, Anna, Mikaela, and Lena completed the plan, which included the importance of trees in the processes of the water cycle, carbon cycle and the economic benefit of planting and taking care of trees. On Wednesday July 1st, Krislia, Anna, and Mikaela met with the teacher at the primary school to present and get approval for the series of visits we will make in the following weeks: we will start off by introducing key topics in the form of a lesson, we will then build a small shadehouse similar to the one at the clinic that will host the baby trees and plants the children will then translpant, and lastly we will paint a mural with the children illustrating both the water and carbon cycles to summarize what they’ve learnt.

That afternoon, the first message of bad news arrived on a kayak: after a quick visit at the clinic, Alec and Anna sadly announced that the grass plugs we had planted in the previous weeks were now dried out and potentially dead. This is due to the incoming dry season, which we had not thought would have affected our work… We will have to devise a way to solve this.