The classroom expands to the orchard

CHALACO, Peru – Evelio Cobba Mendoza is the only teacher at 15356 School, in Las Mishcas Village, and helped by the educational community, he implemented an orchard with food which, as well as compliments breakfasts and lunchs brought by the  Qali Warma Programme, is inserted into other subjects like Communication, Maths, and Technology & environment.

Parents fenced the space with bamboo cane and prepared the land while the school’s children made the grooves and cropped the vegetables. So, the students have learned, for example, there are direct-cropping plants and others those need to be transplanted.

The theacher Evelio Cobba comes from La Florida, a district of San Miguel, Cajamarca Region.  His father, evergildo, loved to read. “He learned by himself,” he tells. “I remember he had two bold books of Botanics, and he taught me to crop,”  he points out so happy. “Today, I teach my students to crop and to eat healthy.”

Vegetables as carrots, beettle, coriander, little radishes, lettuce, cabbage, spring onions, corn, as well as fruit plants like orange, avocado, lime, banana, guayaba, toombo, and medicinal plants, all organic, those can be seen at the school’s orchard, and used by the family mothers to make stews, salads, juices, and other recipes offered to the students.

I have 13 boys and girls studying at the school, in total, coming from villages as Los Guarapos in santa Catalina de Mossa District, Los Pasajes in Yamango District, and Las Mishcas in Chalaco District. Five students are who have to walk until two hours for arriving to the school,” Cobba Mendoza says. “That’s why the feeding brought by Midis-Qali Warma serves a lotbecause gives them the necessary energy to study and to get back their home.”