Siblings battle for cleanest school
How a sibling rivalry helped fuel a school-wide green movement in the Amazon—and an emerging leader
The roots of sibling rivalry were planted one year ago, over dinner.
Sitting around a pot of uchumanga fish stew and bread made of yuca, then12-year-old Frank Shanga Piedra listened as his sister Talia shared her news from the day. Their school in Kanambu, a small village inland from the Napo River in Ecuador’s Amazon Rainforest, won first place in WE’s Clean Schools Program—and Talia led the way.
Just one year separates the brother and sister pair. As Talia recounted how she tended the school garden and taught classmates to keep the bathroom tidy to fend off infections and illness, pride shone on their parents’ faces. Frank decided then and there to follow in her footsteps—to lead the school movement and fight the pollution and environmental degradation threatening their community.
WE Villages launched the Clean Schools Program in five communities in the Amazon, to encourage students to take action on health, hygiene and protecting the environment. Students learn about environmentalism through workshops and give back to their schools by planting gardens, implementing recycling programs and spreading the word about sanitation—all while developing as leaders. The program culminates in an end-of-year competition where one school is crowned winner. Talia, now in Grade 10, led Kanambu to its firstplace finish in the inaugural competition.
For those in Kanambu, the program comes at just the right time. The young community ’s population has ballooned in recent years, growing from a few families to hundreds of people. That growth has brought a lot of good—a road, electricity for the school and clean, piped water.
But it’s also brought challenges in the form of garbage, waste and pollution. Stray plastic bags and errant trash line the road, testaments to Kanambu’s growing pains.
The Amazon is known as the lungs of the planet—but with the right plans in place it could be called the Earth’s largest composting facility. Nature is extreme here. Rain falls all year in great warm torrents from an endless sky. Trees grow ever taller. And everything, eventually, returns to the earth.
Fallen leaves take three days to biodegrade in the damp Amazonian soil. A dropped apple core disappears even more quickly. Plastic is the one thing that refuses to break down, clinging to the land like a blight.
School principal Ramon Liqui Machoa remembers the land before the school was founded in 1998. Then, it was a pasture on the cusp of the jungle. Today, it’s a thriving school, home to over 400 students, a point of pride for the community, and it’s becoming the epicenter of a burgeoning green movement. An educator of 10 years, he sees WE’s Clean Schools Program as an integral piece in the puzzle to protect the environment, because it gets the entire community actively involved.
Just take the example of Frank—he pitched his father, a builder, on his proposal to help solve one of the school’s most pressing problems: there were no garbage bins. The closest town started sending garbage collectors to Kanambu, but without bins there was nothing to pick up. Frank wanted to build natural, durable containers out of bamboo for all to use.
Father and son cut a swath through the dense jungle to the bamboo grove on Frank’s grandfather’s land. They used machetes to chop the stems and hauled them home on their shoulders. They buried one end of each column in the ground, cutting slits along its length to allow it to bend, and then used sticks and wires to shape them into bins.
“It was the first time I’ve built something with my dad,” Frank says, satisfaction creeping into his voice. His classmates started using them right away, putting into practice what they ’d learned in the workshops. Frank also made flower planters and vases to contribute to the school garden and beautify the classrooms.
As for the competition, Kanambu finished third this year—“we weren’t as good as we could have been,” reflects Ramon. Still, there’s no doubt the competition sparked change. Just look at the clean campus.
And there’s always next year.