SchoolsEstela RomeroDecember 18, 2019

"Pedro Ascencio"

SchoolsEstela RomeroDecember 18, 2019

SCHOOL VISIT

Dearest followers, holidays are now starting!. Your Ambassador Monarchs have, one more time this Christmas, made it more special for our children, filling them with joy, knowledge on their own surrounding, prasing of their own identity, of their homeland, their families and their ancestral background; besides, season after season, they realize how their locations and its ecosystems are an extremely important component to the environmental equilibrium of our whole region, as well, as the equilibrum of our planet; they little by little confirm how they and their families are a very important part of a world-wide community fighting for preservation of wildlife and human life into the coming years. Today, only a few days before Christmas, after a wonderful welcoming, as soon as they saw brave VW Rocinante coming from the far trail towards their school and parking outside, they were all running wild and crowding at the main door of the school, opening it wide open for their Ambassador Monarchs to come in!. “This is our first Christmas gift!, “They are here”!, —some shouted to the others—, “Did they come by plain as it has always been?”, “Have you seen the thousands and thousands arriving since the Day of the Dead, teacher Estelita?”. Once at the classrooms, one of the part that children enjoy without end, is this part of telling anecdotes from his seniors at home: “Dad hunted a Coyote the other day; very seldom one can really hunt them”; “My father could see an owl hurt in his wing; it was enormous and heavy; grandpa showed us how the resine from the trunk in the pine trees works wonderful for broken bones and hurts; this is the way they mostly heal broken bones in cows and sheep”; “My grand-ma says that two of the main rivers in the center of our country are born right here at the very peak of our mountains right where Monarchs are overwintering”. “Our grand-ma’s do worry about some plants being scarce nowadays. We need more rain. They know so much about them; when someone in our community is ill, they know the cure for everything, either a cold, or a bad illness, or a broken leg, or young moms delivering a new baby!… they know more than doctors do many times!; We want to study and learn about it with them!”, —Gisela and Virginia told me so incredibly proud and interested in their grandma’s ancestral knowledge on herbs’ remedies and cures, this is an extremely interested aspects of our local cultures still very, very alive!. “We cannot believe that salamandras are signs of the pureness and significant natural storage of water”, —Rommel said not believing himself that this can be true!—. “But what about the Camaleón changing colors from bright to faded brown and grey?, they should be relatives to dinosaurs as well as lizzards, I believe”, —Israel assured having seen several in the forest—. “I heard from my grand-pa that some scientists determined after years studying Monarchs and their habitat around us, that it took several millions years that our mountains looked the way we see them now, so how old could many of our Oyamel trees could be?, how long could it have taken for them to reach 40-50 meters high and 1.5 to 2 meters wide? ; could it be that Monarchs feel wonderful excited wrap to them at such impressive altitudes and that is why they chose them as their favorite trees?”. Dear friends from the North, this first half of our visits to the schools around the Sanctuaries has been fascinating. That Symbolic Migration program and your Symbolic Monarchs bring so much out of them and in the end, the moment we say good bye, they ramain happy and proud to live in a place in the world that many would dream of!. “Please, Estelita, while we learn to speak some English, write to them, thank them on our behalf; tell them we hope they like our letters to them as we love their paper Monarchs, we would love that they could come and visit us and see how beautiful where we live is; over here it is not as cold but we also have some snow!. Feliz Navidad y Feliz Año Nuevo!”.