This week in Childrens Land we focused our energy on our beautiful gathering space under the big green tarp, making it a comfortable and fun space for all.
Through the weekdays, Sadhana Forest volunteers dug and raked the ground to make it soft and sandy for sitting, walking and playing games on. They used local tools, which are also used in the forest, and made the ground smooth and level just in time for the weekend. Their amazing energy continued as the children came to contribute their skills as well.
We had visits from two groups this week: our friends from Apres School on Saturday and the Tamarai Learning and Community Centre children on Sunday! Both groups had lots of energy and the gathering space was transformed in just two mornings.
We continued our project with using garbage to make a bench under the shade, filling up plastic bottles with sand and mixing mud with coconut fibre to build up around the bottles. This project is to illustrate why recycling can be useful, easy and fun – if we use materials that would normally be garbage we can build beautiful creations.
The plastic bottle and mud mixture is useful for all types of structures and we hope that children from all visiting groups will want to continue this project whenever they are in Childrens Land. Some ideas from other groups in previous weekends have been building an Eco Toilet and making more benches.
This weekend we had a special demonstration by one of our Sadhana volunteers to figure out with the children which mud would be best to use in the building process. We divided into groups and took dirt from different areas around Childrens Land to mix with water and decide if it was suitable to build with. The children each rolled balls of mud to see if it was sticky and squishy enough, comparing the different types of mud they had created with dirt and water. We finally decided that one bucket held the best mud for building, and that the dirt inside would have to be gathered more to make more mud. The mud that wasn’t working was either too sandy or would harden in our hands and not allow any room for further mixing, so we started to mix the good soil with water to make good good mud! The children each compared the different types of mud with their hands, rolling balls and showing each other, and then were really excited to start building with the good mud!
We ended up making a new “snake” bench using the bottle and mud method, and we hope to keep at it next week with our next active visitors!
