Five months ago, I arrived in Bali to begin my internship at Green School, the “greenest school on earth.” During the trip, I started a personal and professional quest for my values in education and sustainability. I began a mission to live, learn, and share a more sustainable lifestyle with my surrounding community.
This internship is with the program Terroir: Chocolate, Oysters, and Other Place-Flavored Foods sponsored by faculty member Sarah Williams. Divided into three sectors, my contract focuses primarily on my internship at Student Village at Green School Bali with additional case studies in terroir and permaculture. These three sectors have been critical for navigating me towards my overarching learning objective: to gain knowledge in sustainable living practices. I have supported this learning objective by critically examining themes of food and terroir, building knowledge on the local food system, and participating in community building and education through learning by doing.
My internship is at Student Village (SV), the boarding program at Green School. My role at SV is supervisor; I live with and mentor 7 teenage girls. However, this position has been so much more that just supervision; I have helped develop, implement, and maintain a more sustainable boarding program. Simply put, SV wants to “walk the talk” of Green School by being a living example of sustainable practices. The actions that my team and I have taken the past 5 months are:
-Developing the physical environment by building permaculture gardens throughout the site with the goal of living off the land; implementing a more efficient waste management system by utilizing human waste for compost; banning the use of toxic chemicals for a more sustainable greywater system.
-Changing the food menu to be sourced from ONLY local and organic vendors and mentoring and training Indonesian staff through this implementation; mentoring students to make healthier choices about the food that they buy.
-Designing more efficient transportation for the students via shuttle car system.
-Promoting education about sustainable living practices every Monday during a mandatory Community Day.
-Writing a complete Student Village Boarding manual; designing a SV logo and a new website; starting communications outreach for SV within various social media platforms.
At the beginning of this term, I participated in an Introduction to Permaculture course hosted by Penny Livingston, a renowned expert in sustainability who I had read about last quarter in the Visualizing Permaculture program texts. This workshop was hosted at Student Village and was devoted to implementing permaculture design principles on-site. We assessed the site needs, including the workload between staff and students, and developed a strategy for implementation. At the end of the course, we had established garden beds, living fences, nurseries, herb spirals, and even made pathways out of cacao shells. 5 months later, the garden is lush and still smells like chocolate!
Food sustainability has been one of the most important topics of change at Student Village. Excluding imported, packaged, and processed food has made me more aware of the implications of my personal consumption. I have made it a personal goal to know exactly where my food comes from, which has gone hand in hand with my studies in terroir (aka “taste”) of Bali. During my research, I discovered the terrible impact Indonesian palm oil production has on local fare. How does the corruption behind palm oil production affect the lives, health, and palettes of the locals? To answer this I had to think locally and globally. In an effort to find more economically and environmentally sustainable resources for our kitchen, I learned that one of the only ways to see effective change is to make changes on the local level, which in turn impact the global level. In other words “think locally, act globally.” By making an effort at Student Village to think more sustainably, we successfully educate our local community in a way that allows a blueprint for the larger, global community to become healthy as well.
This term, I had the incredible opportunity to attend the Green Educators Course hosted by Green School. I engaged with with 30 other educators from around the globe to learn about sustainability in education and Green School curriculum. This course helped me actively question what education means to me, both as a student and mentor. The “learning by doing” approach is one that Green School advocates in an effort to provide a more meaningful and enriching education. This approach is was also advocated at Evergreen, where I had to put my hands together with my peers and actively solve problems. In Evergreen’s multi-disciplinary setting, I was able to gain a wider range of competencies such as philosophy, photography, ecology, and design. This is the intention behind the education I wish to bring to the forefront at Student Village. I hope that by mentoring my boarding students to become stewards of the land by harvesting their own food and health advocates by making their own mango sorbet, they will be able to make the connection between school and “real life.” My ultimate goal is to motivate my boarding students to become lifelong learners. This is what Evergreen has done for me.
Among all of the aforementioned actions I have taken to improve the Student Village learning and living experience, the one I hold most valuable is being a mentor to the student boarders at SV. They are my challenge and my reward. I had never worked with kids before, and I’ve learned that every single moment is an opportunity– to educate, influence, and connect to a greater purpose. Working and living with teenagers from all different cultural backgrounds has taught me to be more patient and compassionate with others. I wear many hats on the job; I’m a substitute parent, a counselor, an older sister, a math tutor, and a friend. Regardless of the role that I’m playing, my purpose here is to show the students that love is the most sustainable resource that we can maintain.
The Green Educators Course made me realize that I have a future in education, whether it’s in a school, boarding program, or a family home. As a lifelong learner, I am seeking to follow my passions of working with people and finding solutions. My mission to live, learn, and share a more sustainable lifestyle with my surrounding community is taking an even more creative turn in January; I will be taking an additional internship in the arts department at Green School to help them find sustainable art supplies for their program.
Working at Student Village and being in Bali has been one of the most monumental experiences that I have had in my life. I have deep gratitude for my team, my school, mother earth, and myself; all of whom have played a key role in providing this opportunity. Looking forward, I am excited to continue working to make Student Village a living example of a healthier, happier, and more sustainable way of life.
Harvesting Tomatos by Carol. Oct 2015.
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