"They say 'Think globally, act locally,' but I don't believe that since I got home," she said. "I think it should be reversed: think locally, act globally. Start with environmental awareness. It serves the world better to know the land in (people's) own countries, and bring that to everything else. It makes more of an impact."
Shortly after Christmas, Pearlman got home from the place and experiences that got her started on thinking that way: Belize, where she spent more than six months in an environmental program with The Cornerstone Foundation. She taught organic farming to children.
|
|
Pearlman's involvement in Belize started when her mother found the program on the Internet. Pearlman was interested in visiting the country to study medicinal plants of the tropics, as part of her interest in agriculture as it relates to medicine.
Instead Pearlman, 20, wound up in the town of San Ignacio, Belize, where The Cornerstone Foundation is based. Her task was to spend at least an hour a day working with organic farming with more than 40 kids, age 4 to 13 who lived and attended school nearby. They used about a quarter of an acre of land that was attached to a house rented by the foundation.
Helping the children to work that land were about $500 worth of tools that Pearlman brought with her. The tools had been donated by Ocean Shore Hardware of Half Moon Bay. When Pearlman approached the store before leaving the United States, employees were happy to help. When she went to Belize, she was armed with pitchforks, shovels, water cans and other gardening materials.
"It was so incredible," she said.
She also brought seeds, donated from Ocean Shore, she said. "They were so supportive of what we were doing. I don't know how I would have taught the kids, without those tools."
The organic-farming aspect was tied in with Cornerstone's Food Relief and Aid program. Grant money to support Pearlman's work came through that program, but there were strings attached: that work had to include a component of self-sufficiency, meaning that Pearlman had to teach life skills and empowerment along with cultivating and fertilizing.
Those kinds of lessons came none to soon, she said, for a culture that was drifting away from its time-honored agricultural base. Traditionally, citrus and sugarcane farming had provided an economic base for the country but, Pearlman said, many farmers stopped farming in favor of importing food from nearby Mexico and Guatemala.
"This is a generation of kids that is losing its farming knowledge, especially using natural methods," she said.
She took a quick assessment, and then started to work. Lessons started with the proper way to hold plants and then transplant them.
And the children learned skills in composting and organic farming.
"It was important, the fact that it was organic and not conventional, composted and not chemically fertilized," she said. "It had to do with the environment."
Language was not a problem. The children spoke a mix of Creole, broken English and Spanish. Before long, Pearlman mastered the dialect.
The culture was congenial, she noted. "Much more relaxed than in America, more family-oriented," she said. "The kids participated in the household, cooking, working in the garden and yard. The people are so friendly."
The one aspect of their lives that Pearlman said she didn't get used to was the fact that corporal punishment was still used on misbehaving children. That was "so different for me."
But she found a lot to laugh about and she shared her laughter with the children. She'd brought several small trowels that the children promptly tried to use like they had seen their fathers use when clearing their yards. "I'd always see 4-year-olds try to use them as machetes," she said.
And at first, the kids didn't know how to plant the seeds. They would eat watermelon and toss the seeds onto a planting tray, thinking that would do the trick. "It was really cute," she said.
She spent some time with the Belize Organic Farmers Association, a loosely knit group that focused on organic farming. She attended meetings and helped the group with marketing. And she focused on her interest in organic agriculture as a means of healing.
That stems from her own approach to maintaining health, which she describes as proactive. "I believe in curing disease through good, healthy food," she said. "It's basic prevention."
She described an incident soon after her arrival in Belize in June, when she suffered from a rash and a local "bush doctor" treated it with the juice from a local wild plant. "By that night, it was already healing," she said.
It's something she is already pursuing at the college level. A lifelong Coastsider, Pearlman attended the School of the Arts in San Francisco, studying music and playing the saxophone, and then selected the University of California, Santa Cruz, for college. Now a junior, she is pursuing a double major in community studies and psychology with a minor in legal studies, and is considering environmental law or environmental education.
Her time in Belize gave her food for thought on these matters. "The first thing I realized was the importance of alternative education," she said. "Some days I would try to lecture, but that wouldn't work. I really feel kids need to be fully engaged with the topic, so I showed how it applies to the kid's life."
And, she added, natural methods of farming, like she taught the kids in Belize, can accomplish that.
"Kids need to be reconnected with nature, in a day and age when there's so much development," she said. "There's a way to develop this world sustainably, and it needs to start with kids."
w