We are disconnected from the environment. We spend hours and hours in front of screens and hardly any time taking any notice of what’s happening around us, who people are that not in our intimate circle and what they and the planet we inhabit need.
It doesn’t have to be this way: we can take another look. Reconnect ourselves. Or at least try to.
There are educational programs that help us get back in touch with nature and learn that everything has something to offer.
The problem is that the majority of these courses aim to teach nature, but they forget an essential part of it: the student. In other words, they forget the social aspect of the environment.
Fortunately, organisations exist today that are designing and implementing educational programs that tackle the thematics of the environment from a social standpoint.
We speak with Marisabel Pacheco Pizarro and Carlos Rojas Huerta, Directors at Fundación Apachita an organisation that promotes new environmental education methodologies from Chile to Latin America.
What makes their method so special?
It not only focuses on passing on organic agricultural techniques and horticultural therapy to vulnerable women, but also adds a take on ontological coaching and emotional education.
“If people do not connect emotionally with the environment, no environment is possible.”, they tell us.
The Apachita Foundation intends on constructing new ways of building human-environment and human-nature relationships based on collaboration as a guideline and following the outlook proposed by Nobel Prize winner Gabriela Mistral, an iconic figure and world leader of Latin American education.
This search for new ways of building relationships has a direct tie with the social, economic, and environmental crisis we are faced with. In order to survive, we have to develop a new level of consciousness that amplifies our perspective and point of view which then allows us to understand what is going on and act from a more sensitive, less selfish vantage point. The environment can be a great mentor for us to better ourselves as people, then from this new and improved version of ourselves, we make better decisions.
The Samka Satiri program is among the initiatives that the Apachita Foundation carries out. Focused on delivering social development, economic and environmental tools to migrant women of Iquique in Chile.
According to the UN, 5% of the population of Chile are migrants (939,992 people). Close to 40% of them live in the Macrozone in the north of the country. Most of them are women from Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Haiti.
The migrant women that form part of the program are characterized by a high grade of socio-emotional trait development such as resilience, engagement, and empathy, they possess a strong entrepreneurial spirit and have primary or tertiary education. At the same time, they have a similar unemployment situation, gender violence at home and many of them have no health insurance or formal income.
The Samka Satiri Program looks to meet these challenges through a series of sessions in which they face two big issues:
· Emotional Ecology. The women achieve a greater understanding of their emotions along with physical and bodily sensations associated with said emotions as well as being taught how language plays a key role in their own stories and their lives. This support is especially important at the moment, now that the female migrant population is going through high levels of stress, product of being in lockdown, and at the same time, facing gender violence in the intimacy of their own home.
· Eco Employability. Looks for the labour reconversion of women migrants. From facilitating knowledge of organic agriculture, to the optimisation of water usage and sustainability: they learn about agricultural techniques, water management, circular economy, and citizen science, along with other things.
The Eco employability model creates changes in the domestic economy, incorporating new competences in the organic agriculture field, competences associated with creating collaborative entrepreneurship and how to include sustainable practises.
It also incorporates an additional element focused on improving the home economy, where the beneficiary group can cultivate and harvest their own food, alleviating the cost of food shopping or after sale of these products.
There is a particularly important social reimbursement, now that the doors are opening to new methods of generating income and a greater awareness of the kind of impact that is created with every activity undertaken.
The program currently has a direct positive impact on 60 migrants in the Macrozone north of Chile, and an indirect impact on 300 people.
