As part of their learning about the world, Will’s class is finding out that there are places in the world where people don’t have enough to eat. Starting with Ana’s curiosity about how to send food led the class to a project. They are making a variety of crafts to be displayed and sold at La Divina Gelateria on the city-wide art gallery night (November 3rd) to raise money. They are donating the money to Heifer International, a nonprofit health and development organization that supports animal husbandry, livestock programs, and agroecology efforts in under-resourced areas of the world.
Will is processing what all this means. When he talks about his school projects, he explains that there are places where they have no grocery stores. Or places where the stores are all empty. And in those places, they have to shoot animals and eat them. So they are going to send some sheep, or maybe an elephant (because it’s big), to them so that they can shoot it and eat it.
I am really excited for him to be thinking about these things. It has also offered a great opportunity to discuss places he’s been/lived (but can’t remember). We have been talking a lot about when we worked in rural Honduras (he likes the story about how we use to wash him on the porch in water warmed by the sun) and when we lived in Peru (I tell him that there are many, many people there living in the city who have no water). Although he listens intently, he still has to process this in his way: which means the central question he asks is whether or not people shoot the animals and eat them. At first, I took this in line with his fixation on the forbidden gun — but actually, I think it’s his way of rationalizing how his class project might fit into this world order of things. I’d like to think that he taking what he is learning and working to process it within the context of his own experiences and history. Let’s hope on that.
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