SchoolsEstela RomeroJanuary 15, 2020

To Sierra Chincua Sanctuary!.

SchoolsEstela RomeroJanuary 15, 2020

SCHOOL STORY

Dear friends, courageous VW “Rocinante” will now speed up back straight Northwards, and take us all around “Sierra Chincua” Sanctuary, mostly the second largest in density of Monarchs overwintering altogether with “Cerro Pelón” Sanctuary, and both after “El Rosario“ Sanctuary!. Up there at the peak of the highest and far back mountains in our main image here, at ten thousand meters altitude, the Symbolic Migration proyect will deliver your Ambassador Monarchs school after school, all around those mountains, where Monarchs have been, since their arrival in November on the “Day of the Dead”, enyoing of many bright and sunny and warm days, but others cold, cloudy, foggy and grey too, at temperatures slightly under zero Centigrades. We arrived to our second school visited in the area now, (the first we visited just before Christmas vacation started, when the “Pedro Ascencio” elementary children very specially asked and asked to get their Ambassador Monarchs from you as a Christmas gift!!!. Well, here now we come to our counterpart students attending one of the elementary schools located at the back side of the “Sierra Chincua” overwintering forests, the Indigenous Elementary from “Ranchería Las Rosas”. These children and their families live from cattle and backyard animal raising, and agriculture on the best quality of pink, red, black and white corn, as well as the most delicious and finest quality potatoes we have all over , the “Alfa Potatoes”, which our forefathers assure might have been brought by the Spanish, Italian, French, English or German people during the 19th Century, who came here to do gold, silver, copper and iron mining in the region. Well, we should remember that different to our student friends living at the “Cerro Pelón” Sanctuary area, our children and their families here, as well as the children living in all of the schools and surroundigs we visited around the “El Rosario” Sanctuary area, they DO NOT SEE THE LIFE CYCLE OF THE MONARCH BUTTERFLIES”. Being these two areas over one thousand meters higher than “Cerro Pelón/Macheros” areas, it shall be indeed much colder here for any asclepia to ever have grown wild in our mountains, so this means we all who were born and live in this region and our families, only know of the Monarch life-cycle through magazine images, and much more now, through the special, fantastic, color-illustrated books coming to the schools with the book donation from the “Monarchs Across Georgia” project, specially the “Monarca!”, from writer Ba Rea, to whom, together with the book donation project, teachers and students very specially thank so much!. Dear friends, at our arrival to the school, we could see how every single Monday, at every single school in our country, students and teachers render honor to our Mexican flag. Each group will take turns at a time every week, to organize the students who will carry the flag all around the main yard while our National Himn is played and sung. Then, a group of other children from the same class, shall remind the heroic lives of a few of our many Heroes of Independence, their legacy and important historical dates relevant to it. Once at the classroom, Estela discussed with students about the way pollinators are being harmed all over (they could perfeclty remember our lesson on pollinators the last season), and now, compare, through the printed slides in their hands, the degree of risk, according to what they can observe every day witht their families at their own surrounding, the way some animal and plant species that have been disappearing over the last years and decades up to the extinction of a few of them already. Students, as at every school, fantastically enrich our lesson of the season, with incredible anecdotes they hear from their own grand-parents, and eldery people in their village, mainly. “Our Sierra Chincua” creecks and springs in the forest are being studied by one of our most important university researchers, since they are refuge of at least two varieties of Salamanders. We are so used to seeing them everywhere; we have learned from these researchers that Salamanders are, similar to Monarchs a really important sign of how healthy ourlocal ecosystem may be, —or not—”, —Heriberto, a pupil in class, stated, very knowledgeable and proud, as all of his classmates, from their own beautiful surrounding natural area.