1 month - THE CLIMATE COMPLIANCE CONFERENCE

I will summarize three main reasons at the base of my negative experience at Richmond Vale Academy (RVA): organization, knowledge and safety.
1. Organization: the 90% of your time at RVA will be spent in the activities necessary to run the school. These activities are: cleaning the different part of the school (kitchen, main hall, garden), food production ,harvesting food, garden farming and building week-day-weekend (the length depend on what it is planned). For the cleaning you will spend 1h every day plus once a week an entire morning as the food production. All these activities are time consuming because you will receive contrasting instructions on how you have to do them or no instruction at all.
Other activities as beach and river clean up are not organized: you are not aware why you are doing that, if it is a part of a bigger program and again how you have to do the work (ex. during the first beach clean up we collected all kind of trash: plastic, metal, glass, etc.; only in the end we were told that we were supposed to pick up only plastic).
2. Knowledge: the program promised '' Intensive studies about sustainability, organic farming, the importance of self-sufficiency in impoverished communities, the risks/effects of Global Warming and Climate Change in the Caribbean, etc. Through research, creation and implementation of projects in nearby villages, promotion, and by example, students will work to prepare the people of the Caribbean for the dangers of Global Warming''. In order to accomplish successfully these goals a teacher (during the program you are considered a student attending a school) must have a depth understanding of the topics that he/she supposed to give lectures about. In reality, no one of the teachers have a background on environmental science or on other subjects related to Global Warming and Climate Change. In one month I attended: 2 lectures (1 h) about Permaculture (I read the same information in Wikipedia); 1 lecture ( 1 h) about food security and health (the information we received were poor and extremely confused); 1 lecture about renewable resources (we did a quiz-discussion about the different renewable resources), again information were poor and incorrect (ex. in general in a shallow geothermal system you don`t drill a borehole, this is not true); 1 workshop about Global Warming and Climate Change (again information were poor and confusing (ex. we were talking about water management and nobody, teacher included, was aware about the hydrological cycle) . Only 2 guest lectures were informative and interesting and both were hold by academic experts about biodiversity and soil erosion in St Vincent and Grenadines. Also, I was extremely surprised about how the school`s teachers express their completely refusal of an academic education and mistrust on the expertise opinion about environmental topics.
3. Safety: I felt that the area where the school is located is not safe: we experienced an episode of steal money and an attempted rape.
The basic hygiene standard are not present in the kitchen, where an incredible amount of flies and cockroaches were present.
Also, during the beach cleanup the safety of the participants was not considered: we had not enough gloves for everyone and no instructions were provided about how to manage the waste. In the beaches as well in the rivers you can find everything from plastic to glass, even rusty metal objects and common trash bags and we experienced an high numbers of children ready to help collecting these kind of waste exposing them to diseases.