solve the food shortage problem

Save the world, and solve the food shortage problem, we promoted organic garden in school campus.

1. Sommario progetto

Sommario:

In 2006, Abel Machado School of the tiny community of Massambará, Vassouras, Brazil, participated in a Fire and Ice event that challenged schools to implement one activity to combat climate change in their local area. The school developed its own organic compost for fertilizer, and then built an organic garden on a small plot of land within the school grounds.

In 2008, Burkina Faso got the award of Elluminate Fire And Ice. eClassroom -in- a- box after Brazil. In 2008 Sep., we started a new team group: Taiwan, Mali from Africa, Turkey, Israel, Indonesia, Japan, Uzbekistan from Asia, Solomon from South Pacific, and Cuba from South America joined this new group. Due to the financial problem, Elluminate Fire and Ice no longer provided any classroom -in-a-box for the participants. But we still continued this interesting and meaningful project.

At the beginning, Jules Ouedraogo from Burkina Faso was African countries coordinator, Valmir Azevedo was coordinator of Brazil and Portuguese speaking countries, Mayte, Spanish speaking countries coordinator, and I, Cindea, Asia-Pacific coordinator worked together under the direction of Stace Wills, global coordinator from Canada, After Feb. 2009, Elluminate Fire and Ice stopped all of the coordinators’ work, for the global financial depressed. Only I left for this project connection and the continuing work because I work voluntarily.

In Feb, 2009. one of my iEARN friends, Claude, from France would visit Cuba. It’s a good opportunity for us to connect Cuba. Because they only had snail mails, and very difficult to connect with us. Meanwhile, we didn’t have any financial support, and we even couldn’t afford the webcam or microphone for the Cuba school, Villena Revolucion, Havana. Stace provided the equipments himself, and Claude tried his best to help this first Live Event, connected Canada, Cuba and Taiwan. French Alliance helped on Feb25th, but failed. On March 4th, Rafael and Claude continued to challenge this impossible mission, French Embassy gave us the best internet connection help, and we met on line and wrote the history. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIV0XgR4j_Q

Cuba students did a great job on their organic garden project, and Rafael is a great teacher on guiding them. That was a project for rural and underprivileged urban communities at the beginning, but after this Live Event, we went to another era. We didn’t have any financial support, only Elluminate technical support on V room, and we changed a new world coordinator, Steve Hargadon from the States. He doesn’t really know about our organic garden, but provided us free to use Elluminate VC system generously. I, Cindea Hung, who is in charge of it now. If I can write a co-worker, that should be Sounkalo from Mali. We hosted this project ourselves since Feb 2009.

However, we still continued working on our organic garden project, and held some Live Events for our students. The most important is we were not affected by economy depressed. Most of the schools independently ran the project. Solomon got the seeds from Taiwan Embassy, and started their organic garden project no matter how the bad weather condition it was.

In May, 2009, Stace introduced his former project participants, Rocio and Jarold, from Colombia to join our team. Their projects are Climate change and recycling. We had a volunteer interpreter, Daniel, from Argentina, too. We again united more teachers, and refreshed our team. In July, 2009---few days ago, Stace came back again to our team, to be the world coordinator, and I think we’ll have a brand new team next semester.

2. Paese (Città / Regione)

Stato:

Taiwan

Città:

Kaohsiung

3. Nome dell'organizzazione che presenta il progetto

Organizzazione:

Feng-Xi Junior High School, Taiwan, and Elluminate Fire and Ice

4. Tipo di organizzazione

Scegli tipo:

Scuola

5. Coordinatore del progetto

Nome e Cognome:

Cindea Hung (Tsui-chin Hung)

E-Mail:

cindy02102001@yahoo.com.tw

6. Website

Il sito web del progetto:

http://www.youtube.com/user/Taiwanfxm

7. Selezionate la categoria di appartenenza del vostro progetto

Youth Education Project. Select Project Users by age:

Fino a 10 anni

Inserimento dei giovani nel mondo del lavoro:

NOT Helping youth step in the job market

Creatività e Innovazione sociale:

NOT in Creativity and Social Innovation

8. Da quando è funzionante il vostro progetto?

Da:

01/08/2009

9. Obiettivi ed elementi di innovazione

Please explain the targets and the background of your project:

Different countries grow the same vegetables, and try to find the differences among them. Weathers and climate change affect the vegetables growing and insects existence. Let the students be aware of the problems we need to face in this century--- food shortage and it’s hard to get harvest. Try to find the stories behind the food… and hope to stimulate the students to do something helpful for the world. Learned to respect our food, tried to grow vegetables with left-over or throw-away vegetables from school kitchen, and created a new small paradise in our campus. Vision: to combine the strength from the communities and achieve this dream. The additional development: to attract the students to go back to the rural areas and develop agriculture in the future.

Come, e con quali mezzi cerca di raggiungere gli obiettivi prefissati:

We try to get the awareness of people, it’s a global problem of food shortage, and climate change affected every living life. We must face it, and solve it as soon as possible, and then our new generation can have a better life than they will meet. Also, we’d like to combine the strength from community and government as well as schools to create a harmonic society. Let the organic gardening techniques transfer to the school campus. Farming is interesting, not boring like the old times, maybe the young generation would like to work for it. For example, there are many farm fields stopping working because the youth would like to work in the fast food restaurant or convenience stores, they are afraid of working in the farm. In the future, maybe we can connect the agriculture schools to support on the techniques. It’s only a small demonstrated garden, and we can let it become a community school.

Quali opportunità/problemi affronta:

Global food shortage will become the greatest crisis in the near future. We need to educate the students to treasure what we have, to maintain our environment and keep it going. In order to improve our health, we need to be aware of using chemicals, and save our food source. Respect the food as well as using recycling system to create a non –chemical life.

Please explain what is unique or special in your project:

Use organic fertilizer, no chemicals are the target of our organic garden. The students should learn how to make organic fertilizer and compost with leftovers or throw away vegetables from the kitchen. Throw away vegetables are fruit peels, or vegetable stem which we can’t eat. It’s kind of recycling. We make liquid fertilizer ourselves. With the techniques from Buddhist foundation, they promote use leftover and recycling food to make useful fertilizer, and hope the common family can collect their leftovers to reuse it. It can reduce garbage, the problem of wasting food and pollution from over-produced trash. They taught the teachers, and we built a liquid fertilizer system in the back yard of our school kitchen. The fertilizer is very nutritious and useful, use 300:1 or 200:1 to water the vegetables. It can be used as dredging the block in the pipe. Different countries use different fertilizer or compost. We made traditional fertilizer---compost, too. It is a little similar to liquid fertilizer, but smells good, like corn.

10. Risultati

Describe the results of your project as per today:

At the beginning, the students thought they needed to work under sunshine, did weeding job, worked with dirt, and bad smell from the fertilizer… They were not willing to do it. But they are interested in it now, especially after the harvest time. The organic garden became their secret place. More and more teachers and students wanted to join it in every school. We had the same experience. Many teachers asked about our organic garden in the school campus, even tried to take it over…Especially the participated students are interested in it, for live is uncertain and vividly, even the small world in our organic vegetables garden. You never know what will happen and you even can’t expect the achievement from it. It’s full of challenge. We went through it, and see the future from our small world. It’s amazing, and we treasured the opportunity to work together, had experience exchange, even from different countries and different schools.

Ps. I can’t give the result of per today due to the project specificity. It’s a long term, slow improved job, and we can’t see the result every day.

In che misura risponde ai bisogni degli utenti:

At the beginning, we collected 4 girl students to do this project. They are city children, but then the miracle happened. We started to have little harvest. I took it home to make gourmet food. They expected the food, and tried to grow more. It challenged their skills from liquid fertilizer to the compost. They screamed while saw the insects first time, but they changed their attitude as time flew, they are interested in everything in their organic garden. As to the international teachers and students, we used Elluminate VC system to have our reports and presentations almost once a month. Besides, TIG blog provided us a platform to keep our paper reports. Teachers and students can communicate with one another easily. We had technique exchange in fertilizer, compost and insect protection. Besides, cultural exchange on vegetables growing and food making from the organic garden are really interesting. We fulfilled our life with each other in some ways.,

Quanti utenti interagiscono con il progetto mensilmente e in quale modo:

At the beginning, we had Mali from Africa, Taiwan, Turkey, Israel, Indonesia, Japan, Uzbekistan from Asia, Solomon from South Pacific join this project. But as I said, there’s no expense support, and there’s no temptation to attract schools to join it, some countries left, but more passionate facilitators joined. For instance, Cuba from South America, Colombia, two teachers, Rocio and Jarold joined us in different key time. It’s difficult for us to communicate with Colombian teachers, they just started to join language training program. How could we have VC together? Elluminate Fire and Ice had no interpreters now. I found my iEARN collaborator an Argentina college student, Daniel, he would like to help us voluntarily. So our new participants appeared while we needed. I never invited new participants, but it came up automatically and naturally. We don’t have expense, and I just took over the job from Sep. 2008. We need time to organize the new participants. Fortunately, in July , 2009, our global coordinator Stace Wills continued to be in charge of Elluminate Fire and Ice. Soon, we’ll have support from Fire and Ice. Besides, I think quality is more important than quantity, and good project can be proved to worth waiting, After one year experiment, I think it’s time to expose this project to the world. We’ll use our favorite VC system and TIG blog to communicate with. That’s the best way to keep the project working.

Descrivete in quale modo il progetto contribuisce a migliorare l'educazione e la formazione dei giovani:

We should stimulate the enthusiastic involvement of the students and teachers. Some countries which expect to have some financial support will leave, and who still works for the interests and passion will stay. We keep the students’ enthusiasm by VC and blog connection. The student’s enthusiasm will influence the success of project, no matter how the teachers promote, the student’s attitude affect the result. It’s very practical. How to promote the student’s motivation is the most important. We had new semester, middle semester, and final presentation. Every time we gave the participants one target to achieve. It’s a great platform to present our achievement on the organic garden via VC. The students are excited to meet their collaborators and talked about the problems that they faced, they are not alone, they have companions. The students got great improvement by way of presentation and communication. Besides, they know more about different cultures, how to respect others, share the experience, and make friends. The benefit is unestimated. Make the students interested in it, and once they get it, they won’t quit.

Descrivete in quale modo il progetto ha ottimizzato la partecipazione di professionisti, ragazzi, giovani o altri soggetti:

We use Elluminate VC system as well as TIG blog to connect the students and teachers. I recorded all of the VC , and made the films for every VC, showed them on Youtube. http://www.youtube.com/user/Taiwanfxm The participants are glad to see their presentation and effort on Youtube. VC is an important tool for the participants to communicate with. Without it, the activity won’t be so vivid and interesting. I recorded with films on Youtube according to the VC records. I enjoyed making films for our participants, too. Now, the participants are good at ppt making and some started their film making, too.

Descrivete in quale modo il progetto favorisce l'uso delle nuove tecnologie da parte di professionisti, ragazzi e giovani per lo sviluppo culturale e didattico:

We used Elluminate VC system. At the beginning Every participant is not good at controlling the VC using, and after one semester, they are used to it, as to the TIG blog, due to inconvenient internet connection in the rural area, the students can’t use it often, we let teachers work on it. Frankly speaking, we didn’t do well on our blog, only Taiwan , Mali and Turkey teams used it. Cuba team has no internet connection, either. We got their snail mails once a month. Cultural exchange is also an important part of communication, It existed everywhere and any time when we get into touch with. The students know how to respect each other, and that’s more important. We love to collaborate together, and maintain the long term cooperation. Students and teachers learned to use ICT as communicative tool, good at ppt making, and perform their presentation with VC whiteboard. We will be even better next semester, we believe.

Descrivete i criteri che usate per misurate i risultati raggiunti dal vostro progetto:

We had a topic before every VC, and let the participants prepare for it in advance. The topic should be concerned about the progress that we made before the semester. The participants use ppt to show their achievement on their organic garden project. For example, we had compost, fertilizer, soil, insects, and harvest reports. Every team should start from the beginning. Sometimes we can’t achieve the goal in time, but we can make up next time. We need to have toleration and consideration, so that we can continue our collaboration. We should understand the different situations, and express our concern on it. We are not in competition but collaboration to achieve our team work

The followings are the films which illustrated our work

1. This is the dairy of the second week 15 Sep

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6ILhHXquTw

2. Organic Garden First Live Event 24 Oct, directed by Stace Wills---Elluminate Fire and Ice.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3h26cJCaQfI

3. Halloween Party Live Event---introduced our countries and student’s self-introduction

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YnlmAqwscg

4. Organic Garden Taiwan vs. Indonesia

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2Vr5jn_neY

5. Organic Garden Cuba 1st VC---Mission Impossible Cuba Chapter

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIV0XgR4j_Q

6. Organic Garden teacher's VC on April 8th

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94C7yhMhX2M

7. May7th ppt

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvmttysk3Vg

May7th VC

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cHLXSOtp98

8. May18 VC part II, Colombia presentation. The participants are Colombia, Turkey, Mali, Cuba, France, Canada & Taiwan. Topic: Climate Change, Recycling & Organic Garden

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IKoJW2g3Dw

This is the film of Colombia projects presentation. Participants from Turkey, Mali, Canada, Cuba, France, Argentina, and Taiwan supported them. This film is their ppt show.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcgrirb9CYg

9. June 8th VC---new collaboration, climate change

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0fIyeINi2s

10. June12 VC part I---ppt show

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZY8HVD-X6Q

June12th VC Part II_final presentation

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuM0NAeQF4M

11. Sostenibilità

Indicate la durata complessiva del progetto:

Da 1 a 3 anni

Is your project economically self sufficient now:

Insert date:

08/01/2009

12. Trasferibilità

Il progetto è stato replicato/adattato altrove:

Specifica:

This project was from Brazil. Elluminate Fire and Ice supported Brazil and Burkina Faso, but they didn’t continue this work as soon as I joined this project. I only had one VC with Brazil school, that’s their report before I knew them, no new report. Since Elluminate had financial problem, they didn’t support any school after 2008. They asked me to take it over, continue the project. I invited my friends to join it. They are all from iEARN---International Education And Resource Network. We did project with the way of self-sufficient. Sometimes we asked for help from community or government technically, not economically. For example, I asked Taiwan Embassy to provide seeds for Solomon DLCP, Distance Learning Center. France Embassy helped on Cuba VC while my friend, Bourdon Claude went to Cuba for school visiting, and Stace Wills provided webcam and speakers personally. Our school got the skills of making liquid fertilizer from a Buddhist foundation, and the Environment Bureau in my county set the fertilizer system for us. That’s because they would like to promote leftover recycling.

Technically, we continued the project that Brazil proposed, but they stopped doing it, and we continued doing it, and achieved it with many new participants from Sep. 2008.

Che cosa possono imparare altri soggetti dal vostro progetto:

1. Leftover recycling. 2. organic food---no chemicals 3. organic fertilizer production 4. climate change---different countries grow the same vegetables at the same time or different time. 5. To combine the strength of community and school. 6. To find the help around us.7. projects without economic support can still be existed. 8. respect our food, growing vegetables with leftovers and organic way without chemicals is not easy at all, but worth trying.

Siamo disponibili ad aiutare altri soggetti a sviluppare progetti o a migliorare progetti esistenti:

Siamo disponibili ad aiutare altri soggetti a sviluppare progetti o a migliorare progetti esistenti.

13. Informazioni aggiuntive

Background:

Elluminate Fire and Ice world coordinator Stace Wills organized this project. In Sep., 2008, he invited me to join this project. They had African coordinator, from Burkina Faso, south American coordinator from Argentina, and I, Asia- Pacific coordinator. They provide free Elluminate VC system to connect the teachers and students from different countries. It’s the best communication tool for the project. We used it as our presentation platform. Students and teachers shared their experience of the project, and discuss it there. We had a website to keep all of our records there. TIG http://fireandice.tiged.org/GlobalOrgGard1

I also kept all of our VC records and my school records on youtube http://www.youtube.com/user/Taiwanfxm

At the beginning, I invited my iEARN friend Sounkalo from Mali to join us, then Huri from Turkey, Suparno from Indonesia, Andoss from Solomon, Yoshiko from Japan, Sobir from Uzbekistan, Ruty from Israel, Claude from France, Rafael from Cuba. Sounkalo is the only teacher who joined this project with me from the beginning, and he helped me host every VC. I couldn’t solve the participant’s on line instant problem, guided the students, and hosted the VC at the same time. We always support each other when we need. As to Daniel, he did the same during our VC to Colombia, so I had two important assistants.

Due to different time zone, it’s difficult for us to have VC together. Some countries are very active on project execution, like Mali, Turkey, and Cuba. Some almost stopped, like Uzbekistan, they changed the manager of their learning center. Japan, no improvement for the teacher was busy on Yokohama Youth Summit arrangement. Israel, may start from next semester, Indonesia, too busy to join our VC, though they had three teachers visit our organic garden already.

16.2 Barriers: What were the major barriers or challenges to the implementation and the acceptance of your product/process/service by the involved subjects?

Solomon had bad situation, weather, no rain, too much rain, stopped classes….but Andoss kept working. From sending seeds until got seeds needed half a year. And then bad weather condition, no fresh water, even for drinking. I visited Solomon in 2007 for an ICT conference, and knew the Taiwan Embassy, and then they became one of my backup, supported my projects as well. Cuba’s case is another challenge. My friend, Claude told me he might go to Cuba for school visit. I asked if he could pass a speaker and webcam to a school called Polytechnic Center Villena Revolution for us. He said it was the school he wanted to visit. Then we started to arrange everything in two days. Meanwhile Elluminate Fire and Ice stopped all of the support to Organic garden project. I was the only one to be in charge of it. Stace promised to pay for the speaker and webcam personally. Claude caught up the flight at the last moment ( He cancelled the flight tickets, for it’s difficult to correspond with Rafael) and passed the equipments to Rafael for us. He started to arrange the VC for three sides. France Embassy and French Alliance did help a lot, without them, we couldn’t achieve this impossible mission. That’s the amazing of collaboration. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIV0XgR4j_Q

The hardest challenge is the best achievement.

Ostacoli:

I asked for help from my friends who we had collaborated for over one year. iEARN has a resource of network, we support each other when we are in need. We can always find friends to help one another. If we have any trouble on connection, friends will help and communicate with. Sometimes, the Embassy will help us, too. Embassy helped a lot in Solomon and Cuba events. France Embassy and Taiwan Embassy helped us on internet connection and seed providing. Ask for help in the right time with right way is important, too. When we want to do something meaningful, the whole world will help us. It is the truth.

Soluzioni:

Future plans and wish list:

I planned to promote our organic garden project during Japan Yokohama Youth summit in August, for our topic is environment, climate change and global warming. We discussed this topic for over a year, and this project take our notion into action. But due to Swine flu, they cancelled the Youth Summit. The ideas of organic garden can help solve our future problems. I think after almost one year’s experiment, it’s time to develop it.

I’d like my participants to work like a big family. That’s why we had not many participants at a time. We’ll try to make the project attractive to the students. So far it really was. All of the school students became interested in it, especially they are waiting for the harvest, and looked for the insect solution and met together on line, made friends, compared with different vegetables growing skills, cultural exchange, etc. Using Elluminate Fire and Ice VC system with the help from Elluminate is the key of success, too. Seeing is believing, we used VC to strengthen our friendship, and good connection system is necessary and important, too. That’s the student’s motivation. We are so lucky to have Elluminate as our support. We’d like to promote more schools from rural areas to join us, to discuss more about the global problems and try to solve it by collecting more people to be aware of it and find the way to solve it in advance. Let’s have a better life in the future. We will use our motto “Just do it” to achieve this mission.

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Organic Garden project