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His school is full of people and he wants to be the best host. Before the guests take their feet out of the car, she sticks her head out the window, sticks out her thumb and asks how they are and if the trip was comfortable, genuinely hoping to hear the answer. Thomas Arango Chavarro is barely 12 years old and has a small body that does not match that adult and elegant attitude. “Welcome to my school. I hope you have the best of days,” he says with a jumping voice. He chews gum out of nerves, it doesn’t take him long to recognize it. “Today is a very important day,” he explains to the strangers.
Among all the guests that the Montessori San Francisco public school will host, in the heart of the Colombian coffee region, will be the Minister of Education, Aurora Vergara, who will come to learn about the Cafelab project. Thanks to this initiative, in a few hours they will receive the award for the best educational center in the world in the environmental action category in the World’s Best School, awarded by the T4 Education organization. But Arango still doesn’t know that. And for him this is a visit to learn about the sustainability work they have carried out together with teachers and colleagues since 2017.
Cafelab started six years ago in an attempt by teachers Ramón Majé Floriano (Mathematics and Physics) and Jorge Andrés Lizcano Vargas (Natural Sciences) to develop skills in students that would not be forgotten “every eight days.” After an outing, they began to realize the environmental problems caused by coffee waste and decided to make it the basis of the curriculum. “The first thing we wanted was to think about strategies to reincorporate them into nature and then give the kids the opportunity to delve deeper into the subjects they need. Why am I going to do a project to talk about uranium contamination if there is not something real here?” Lizcano asks. “That is what we have to talk to the ministry about. See how we can take what we achieved to other schools.”
This project, which was developed in three villages in the municipality of Pitalito, Huila, and involved about 200 families, proposed a change in the institution’s curricular structure. Thus, it was determined that the formulation and resolution of real problems would be consolidated as the central axis of the study. A decision that makes sense in a place like Pitalito. Around 21,000 tons are produced here annually; It is one of the municipalities with the largest coffee area in Colombia. “Where the best is,” the children clarify. Here the coffee bushes in all stages of growth appear on the edges of the road and also delimit the beginning and the end of this rural school, where 330 students between 5 and 18 years old study. So far in the process, the program has reintegrated more than 100,000 tons of coffee pulp.
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Aromatic drinks with coffee pulp; ecological briquettes with husks as firewood substitutes; artistic works with the remains or cunchos; electrical energy from the pulp and mucilage (the gelatinous layer that covers the seed and gives it sweetness) or organic compost. The students’ creativity has no limits and they are already thinking about what will come next. Ana Lucía Gutiérrez Morales is clear about it: let the coffee remains be the ones that bring electricity to the neighborhoods that do not have it.
She decided to join the clean energy generation group since she heard her cousin tell her about what they did. “The pulp and mucilage have the ability to generate electrical energy through the oxidation-reduction process. [por la transferencia de electrones tras la descomposición y la acidez que generan]”, she says concentratedly. “It is a very exciting process.”
So far, they have managed to light 12-watt light bulbs, thanks to some containers that they hold carefully in their hands. In a kind of closed pot they preserved for days a small portion of decomposing pulp and mucilage that directly rubs against two plates: one of zinc and the other of copper. These are responsible for generating electricity. “It was magical to learn all this,” says the young woman. The project is now developing a way to unify all the electricity generated into a battery that can be transported comfortably. “I know many neighbors who don’t have electricity, it would be very nice if we could change it. Even better if it was with what the coffee growers don’t want and throw away, right?”
“It works because we investigated it”
Another of the school’s great undertakings is the creation of compost with coffee waste. 40% of the fresh fruit, the pulp, is thrown away by farmers, mainly to their crops. But the acidity of these remains has changed cycles and blackened several crops, as happened to Jaider Andrés Narváez’s grandfather. That’s why he decided to do something to solve it: compost.
The key to their project was to gather these remains together with the cisco that is used for raising livestock and carefully study what is the best proportion for this organic material to become a great source of nutrients. “It is normal that my grandfather thought that any organic element is good, but that is not entirely the case. I observed on my family’s 80-hectare farm how the remains were piled up in a pit or thrown into the orchards or adrift. “Now we use this compost that I created myself.”
For Professor Lizcano, this study plan brought endless benefits that transcend academics. “I remember that a few months ago one of the students’ grandparents approached us to tell us that his grandson was very intelligent. And since they started Cafelab they have something to talk about. That cannot be measured in any exam, but it has enormous value,” he says excitedly.
“And how do you know that this works?” Vergara asks, surrounded by cameras and parents who came to the school to get to know the minister up close. Narváez doesn’t even think about it: “This is an excellent duo. The secret is in the mixture: 60% dry organic matter and 40% wet pulp. “We know it works because we researched it.” The minister smiles satisfied and she recognizes them for the hard work they have done.
“You are the joy and hope of the country. They are an example of what we can do when we put education at the service of the environmental solution,” she says after the awards ceremony. In addition to international recognition, the school will receive $50,000 to give shape to the dream of this center: a biolaboratory stem-maker, That is, it promotes the development of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. “We want to make a complete x-ray of the coffee that surrounds us,” says Professor Majé, “to take education to another level. This is very important, especially for a rural school. We have enormous pride and a lot of work to do here, in rural areas.”
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