This week we got to load up another bus full of students and take them on a field trip! This time it was our Standard IV and Standard VI classes. They were just as excited as the group that we took just a few weeks ago and were quite satisfied that they got to travel a little further than the first group that went to the airport.
This group went to a large rose farm that is about 60 km west of our school. It tied in very nicely with a lot of the concepts they have been learning about in their science classes - the plant life cycle, different types of plants, environment and hydroelectric energy.
After a fun (and thankfully safe) bus ride, we were warmly greeted by the management and immediately swept away to check out a greenhouse full of roses.
Students were told that this particular greenhouse is for testing different varieties of roses from all over the world. They test to see which ones might be suitable in the local environment. Which ones are prone to disease? Which ones attract bugs? What kind of irrigation and fertilizer do they need? Do they pack well? Are they desirable to customers?
Students were very curious about everything and asked many great questions. They all wondered why this company would be shipping so many roses to Europe. What do people do with all these roses? The worker explained that people in Europe will pay a good price to be able to give roses to people, especially to people in the hospital or to people they love. Understandably, this was a totally foreign concept to our students. Why would people want to pay so much money for flowers? Everyone here has an abundance of flowers growing in their yard, so you just go out and cut flowers when you want them. Why would you pay for them? And if you're going to give people a gift to show you love them, why not give them some food that they can eat? I must say, I see their point. :)
I was nervous that he had all the students gathering around the cut flowers (they CANNOT keep their hands off of anything) until I heard him say that these were the reject flowers. They either had issues with their petals or had a fungus on their leaves. Phew! No worry about damaging flowers they expected to send to customers. They were still beautiful even as the rejects.
From there we took a nice walk down to the place where they have their hydroelectric generator. The students liked seeing all the roses and the greenhouse, but the hydroelectric generator was the real attraction!
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The explanation of this was in Swahili, so I didn't catch everything
but it was something about recycling the water from the plants
and the plants are what turns the water green. |
The hydroelectric generator house sits right beside the river, as you would expect, so we could hear it rushing by.
I just knew they were going to accidentally drop something over the rail or almost fall over it, but no one did. Yay!
They were very excited that they were able to go down 10 at a time and get a closer look at all the operations.
I got to go down there too!
The electricity generated then gets sent through the transformer and up to the farm. The farm has computer systems that regulate all of the irrigation and fertilization in each greenhouse. There are cold rooms for preserving the roses after they've been cut and are waiting to be taken to the plane. Of course electricity is needed in all of the offices. They are able to produce more than enough electricity to run all the operations by using this hydroelectric generator. Students were quite impressed!
Because it's such a lush area, tomatoes were growing wild all over the place. I must admit that I think the farm had a few less tomatoes after some of our young boys had a few unsupervised minutes. Oops! How do I know? They still had tomato seeds on their clothes and faces. Oh boys.
We also got to see their system for creating just the right mixtures of water and chemicals for the roses, all computerized.
By that point, we had walked farther than expected and the sun was shining in full force. Students were thirsty and hungry which made their favorite lunch even that much better. The highlight was that we even had enough for them to go back for SOME MORE! That is what they always want on pilau day, so field trip day was their special day to go back and get some more. It's the little things in life that can make us so happy, isn't it?
Then to top it all off, each student was given a rose to take home. They were so pleased! As kids like to say on a special day, I heard many exclaiming, "This was the best day ever!"
Again, what fun it is to see learning and experiences through the eyes of kids. And I know for sure that these concepts that had been so abstract before - irrigation, greenhouses, hydroelectric power - have become concrete to them. They no longer think that a huge flower farm can be watered by hand. They no longer imagine little green houses with plants inside. And they realize that a hydroelectric power plant does not mean that somehow water creates electricity that is directly connected to a flowering plant. They've seen it, they've experienced it, and they'll never forget it.
