Today is Global Action Day! In all continents over the globe people come together to demonstrate how important is nature, environment, peace to safe Mother Earth for our common future.
So we too invited for a special children class at our Sylviander House Art Museum to discuss the present situation in our village Chettikad and to find solutions to reducing waste in daily life. At this day,11 boys only came, no girls at all. They might have gone to the nearby church, 500 meter away, where at the same time a special program took place – we could hear the sound, since people here want to pray with loudspeakers only.
As always, some kids came 1 hour before the class starts at 3 pm. They were sitting with Alexander at the morning tea veranda on the 1st floor, where they could have a look at his exhibition catalogues and talk about his paintings and art. And of course they liked to walk over the verandahs and overlook the garden with the pond and biotop. When everybody was there I called them into my writing room to sho them on my laptop the photographs of frozen water crystals, taken by the Japanese scientist Masaru Emoto, who explores water in a very special way (http://www.masaru-emoto.net). He writes words with different emotional meaning as hate, evil or love, peace and many more on a waterbottles and examines after a day this water under the microscope, where significant differences are seen. He also exposes water to music nice and harmonious as classical or songs from the Beatles and also to loud and tough music as Heavy Metal. In other studies he applies a variety of photographs on the water bottles or he takes polluted water from rivers and lakes before and after buddhist prayers – I am sure without loudspeakers!
(because of © rights, this is a photograph I took of snow in front of my window in Munich, Germany)
The boys were impressed about the differences to be seen between the positive or the negtive information to water – wether with sound, written words, pictures or prayers. The positive all show beautiful crystals, the negative have scattered formations and no shape of crystal is to recognize. The crystals show water is alive! We talked about how much this means to our daily life – wether we say ugly or good words, wether we have negative or positive emotions to eachother since our body and the body of all other beings even of the planet Earth consists of 70 – 80 % of water.
Afterwards we went down to the Museum and formed 3 groups, each of them got a 2 meter long paper. One group should draw the present situation in our village, which we discussed before to make them understand: Everybody goes to the market with empty hands, coming back with many plastic bags filled with fish, vegetables, rice and wheat … The other 2 groups should think about the consequenses of these habits for our environment and groundwater, then find solutions to change these habits and then draw how it could the look like: To go to the market with cotton bags or baskets, wastebins, recycling …
For me, coming from Germany, it is hard to believe, that most of the places in Kerala – and India – have no waste management. That means in present modern days when people use a lot of plastic for packing and then after use just throw it behind the house or in the neighbor‘s garden or at the beach like in olden times, when packing material was organic made of leaves, used newspaper and schoolbooks. Once in a while people burn their waste.
And there is no solution for energy saving lamps – as in Europe too, but there the shops have the duty to take it back after usage and store it at a save place. Where ever there is a pond or small canal, people use that spot for dumping their waste – even in the canals of Alappuza, which during heavy rainfalls will be blocked and then overflow – in some areas then the houses stand in the water and the people have to rush to park their car at a safer place.
We encouraged the children to discuss the subject among eachother and work as a group together, to communicate their ideas for improving the situation of pollution in their life in our village.
To develop a group mind seemed to be something very new for them. Some were engaged and started to draw, some were just watching what their friends did. Again and again we supported them with tipps to work together for solving a problem.
Finally each group had to explain their ideas and thoughts on the big drawing work and a short discussion followed.
Then, since everybody insisted to dance I introduced them to a circle dance in sitting position and explained the importance to look at eachother for symmetry to becoming a group and getting the idea of being one.
We sat down in a big circle doing some light movements with arms an upper part of the body, then moved forward to the middle keeping the sitting position, until our feet came together forming a small circle. We raised our hands and bowed until the fingers touch the toes … then move back to the big circle.
Everybody was happy and clapping hands and smiled.
It astonishes me always to see how less flexible these children‘s bodies are.
Before they left, I painted with water color a green heart on everybody‘s cheak as a symbol of that global action day and that we understood something. So when they go home and people will ask: »What is that?« They can tell something about …
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