We are delighted to share a blog written by student Sonam, from Swiss International School, Qatar, who are part of a team delivering a Global Goals project for the 2020-21 GSL Global Goals Competition.
Their project is among over 957 social action projects currently running as part of the GSL movement and we are excited to be supporting them to design and lead positive social change in their community.
This was an amazing experience we learned from and have grown with.
Project Summary
We started the year as the smallest bees in the hive, but just because we were the smallest bees from the hive didn’t mean we had small ideas. Our minds were bursting at the seams with ideas but we were too afraid to share them, but when Mrs. Olivier gave us the creative spirit to be free, our ideas came flooding like a tsunami.
Our idea was to create a Biodiversity garden to supplement life and plants to decrease our carbon foot-print and share to the families in our community ways to be sustainable and make the chain go further in the future so that our environment is more sustainable. Our other point while making this garden was to welcome the pollinators to Qatar because there is a small number of bees in Qatar due to the heat and we want the pollinator colony to enjoy living at our school.
Our Journey
It all started when Mrs Olivier and I were talking about GSL (Global Social Leaders). Despite Covid, we had some wacky and crazy ideas about entering our school and a group of people who work well together. We learned that over 1,000 bees die a day due to the overuse of pesticides and other global problems. This even includes bats, the fuzzy innocent creatures. They get killed every day by windmills and we wanted to make a nesting ground where all animals are welcomed to eat, rest and have fun.
So I made the GSL biodiversity group. In my first online gathering, I told them about how I would love to hear their ideas to contribute to the project but that’s when things went downhill. Everyone started fighting about ideas and whose are better than others and soon more people left the group. That’s when I went to Mrs Olivier and I told her about what had happened and all she said was not to give up and that she would talk to the other members who fought. Once Mrs Olivier started talking to the students of the school more about the garden, that’s when admissions came gushing in from all different grades and classes soon we were left with our 7 members: Bisher, Natalie, Jana, Adwita, Soundus, Hamad, and myself (Sonam). Together we know that we can find a way to save all these poor, defenseless animals because we found a way to overcome our difficulties too.
Our classmates helped us to do even more research and soon we had enough data to convince our school leaders to grant us a business loan and some land for the garden. On February 16th, we will start preparing the soil using permaculture methods to trap our CO2 production and we will start our planting. Our school safety officer helped us find land where bees won’t interact with young children and the science department gave us some propagation kits so we are learning so much as well.
Our Next Chapter
To all the other kids our age who are in new environments, we recommend that you should socialize and participate without being self conscious. If we hadn’t, we would have never made such a small project with such a big impact. So we encourage others to stem from our knowledge and research and use it as a backup for your project. Even if it’s just a small project or a small initiative, trust me, you can make a big impact on other people’s lives. The true definition of sustainability and global goals is to carry on and I hope every baby bee in middle school learns from our project and grows with us.
In our next blog, we will show you our new garden and explain why we are called “The Hummingbird Haven” Stay tuned!
The 2020-21 GSL Global Goals Competition is now open and runs until June 2021. If you belong to one of the 500+ teams of students currently delivering a social action project as part of the competition we would love to hear from you and feature your blog and project photos on our website to inspire others.
