Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Wetlands Education at Bang Lang Da's Primary School

On Monday 8th we produced a tremendous schools event, in the primary school that Bang Lang Da village and Ban Talin Chan village share. Jim, Ning and Stephen from MAP were joined by myself and K' Donnapat from Wetlands International, as well as the education officer from the Dept for Marine and Coastal Resources, and both villages' conservation group leaders. After a brief opening speech by the leader of the Taesobahn (sub-district authority), K Donnapat got the talk going with the issues surrounding climate change. K' Donnapat is a natural with the children and seems to thrive off their energy. After a coffee break, the group of children was divided into three. One of these groups was lead by K' Ning of Mangrove Action Project. A professional educator and community development specialist, she engaged the children in discussions about mangrove tree adaptations to inter-tidal life and mangrove food webs.K' Donnapat's devised an educational snakes and ladder's game, where the children had to answer questions about wetlands to be able to move up and down the board.
The third group worked with K' Manoon from the the Dept for Marine and Coastal Resources', who talked about uses and outputs from mangroves.When the group came back together, Jim from Mangrove Action Project covered the problems related to plastic bags, the fact that they take years to degrade, and are often used only once, for just a few minutes. To give the children a permanent reminder, each student was given a cloth bag to keep.
After lunch at the school we asked the children to draw what they wanted their mangroves to look like in the future and then discuss their thoughts in front of everyone else.
After the drawings were presented we moved to the rehabilitation site, where community leaders Bang Dol and Bang Mardee talked with the local children about their experiences of cutting all the mangrove for charcoal in the 1990s and the resulting disastrous effects.
We finished with a brief description of the restoration work at the site and why we were running this project, and Bang Dol concluded the discussions with a brief summary of his crab group's activities.

Thank you to all who took part, the teachers, the support from the DMCR, the people of Bang Lang Da, the children, and the amazing energy of K' Ning and K' Donnapat.

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