The Kids of the Coconut

Local kids walking to Coconut School.

Yesterday I went to Silk Island with some work friends. It's a ten minute ferry across the the Mekong that takes you to a place that actually feels pretty far from the City. It's green, I only needed to use one hand to count the amount of times we were harassed, and when we sat down for lunch, there was silence. We even made a friend on the ferry. She wanted the friendship to move a little faster than we were willing to go, I'm usually a big fan of fast friends and general over investment in people I know very little, but it felt like a bit much to have five minutes with her and then meet her family. 

There was only one place on the Island that I actually really wanted to go to. Don't get me wrong, there is something fascinating about the process of growing and spinning silk, and something even more fascinating about the man explaining it to you who appears to have an obsession with caterpillars falling in love and then making love with 'no coffee breaks'. And there's something really irritating and mesmerising about watching women weave together tiny threads to make something so much bigger with so much patience. But there's also a little school on Silk Island, made almost entirely of old iced coffee cups, bottle tops and tyres. It's also free for local kids to go there. 

In a country with no recycling, where rubbish disposal systems are as simple as dropping it on the street, where the only water that's safe to drink comes from a plastic bottle in some way shape or form, Coconut school's ideas are counter-cultural to say the least. But the concept isn't, the concept of taking something used and broken and seeing it through a redemptive process is something Cambodians have had to become accustomed to. Just like the ladies that weave the silk on the Island, the people here seem to have an understanding of what it means to patiently pursue something bigger. But environmentally, we've all got our part to play. We've got a lot to learn from the kids of Coconut School.

They don't just learn in the recycled materials, they learn out of them. Kids at Coconut school are taught recycling as a subject, alongside English. Somewhere, in a tiny town on Silk Island, social change is starting with children who get recycling. People who are faced with the challenges of poverty on a daily basis are making decisions to better their environment and the future of the communities that they live in. In the same week that Donald Trump decided to do his worst to climate friendly policies, there are kids going to school just to learn about how they can better their environment. It rained all day on Saturday, and every time I've mentioned that to a local, they've said something along the lines of 'it didn't used to be like this at this time of year, but with climate change, it is'. In Donald Trump vs. Coconut school, I'm rooting for the little guys.