"Corregidora Elementary" — Symbolic Monarch Migration

OUR VISIT

Dear friends, the Symbolic Migration will be running somehow chaotic around our three Monarch Sanctuaries, attending every request for a visit depending on each teacher, school, family, neighborhood leader, groups of friends and school classmates’ availability outdoors. We shall always describe to which location your Ambassadors are moving to and being delivered!. Now, we come back higher in altitude to the “cold land”, as Angangueo town and its two Sanctuaries “Sierra Chincua and “El Rosario” are called. Your Ambassadors are now being delivered to a group of children whose parents and teachers requested the Symbolic Migration visit, in order not to miss this year’s lesson for the school. Students are allowed to get their religious preparation at the facilities of their school with the necessary sanitizing preventions. Ocampo town, to which the “Corregidora” Elementary belongs to, is located right at the bottom valley to “El Rosario” Sanctuary. Most families in the small villages surrounding the Sanctuaries provide themselves of goods here each weekend. The “Corregidora Elementary” is a private school existing for around 90 years in a point located between Angangueo and Ocampo towns, the two main entrance doors to these two Sanctuaries. Once our educational authorities declared our schools closed due to the break out of the pandemics, a big change in our daily lives would come: “we families were not prepared with a computer at home, a smart phone, or a tablet for every child in the family, to have them to attend distance schooling”, --most parents complain--. “It has resulted a real challenge for our students, in spite of many of them in town counting now on the necessary tools to face the current situation at home, to keep up with their studies under these circumstances. Even though we have computers as a subject, they are not used to attending classes through the use of technology at all; it is for us teachers also difficult to try to assist our students as they need and to keep a real progress in our lessons. So many children and parents feel so helpless… --Nun Cristy commented--. “We miss our schools; we need our teachers with us to explain our lessons; we miss our school friends too”—boys and girls commented--. Children at “Corregidora” Elementary were really happy to continue learning about our local ecosystem, this time, besides recognizing every tree species in our forests, by learning about the special characteristics of the Oyamel trees, favorite for Monarchs in our forests to roost. “Wow, this is why so many foreign people come to visit them!, it is Monarchs, but it is also knowing the special place and the micro-climate conditions where they overwinter and also this special tree they seem to love more than any other”, --students said--. Most families in Ocampo town have historically lived from forest benefits. For some reason, the Oyamel trees’ lumber is not the most commercial in the lumber industry though; “so if the Oyamel trees are belonging to very high and cold climate, it means that this burning sun we are having at this time of the year, besides the warm temperatures (25 Centigrade average), mean totally new conditions for Oyamels, for insects hardly getting the right levels of humidity, for amphibians not having water enough… the reduced nucleus of Oyamel trees seem to be permanently at risk. The rest of tree species are also included; our forests mean an extremely important protection barrier for animal, plant and human life in the region”, --we all enriched the lesson with these last comments--. Our discussion and learning on our own forests and local ecosystem will bring in many more points to discussion as we go on. This, together with how this enormous challenge of distance schooling system due to the COVID pandemic is being faced up day by day by our local society, specially by our families living up in the small villages surrounding the Monarch Sanctuaries where the panorama is even more complex, will continue in coming visits. Keep following your weekly updates to the Symbolic Migration blog!