UWC Day at Pearson College

What a glorious day today. One of the quietest places in the world is a UWC campus on a Saturday morning. Not this Saturday. We all got up to celebrate the first UWC Day. We all challenged ourselves to find ways to live out the UWC values in some way, either individually or in groups. And we were helped along by agreeing not to use any electronic devices or the internet from sunrise to sunset.

Here are some snapshots of what happened on this exciting day.

As the sun came up on the bay, students fired up the bread baking oven in anticipation of preparing bread for dinner for everyone on campus.

And breakfast, like all meals for the day, was sourced as locally as possible. Here we start off with pancakes with blackberries picked in the nearby woods.

And we challenged each other at the tables to write down what the UWC values mean for us – for today and beyond.

Students read a proclamation of thanks for the work they did the night before joining groups in Victoria marking the eve of the Day of Peace, 21 September.

We really were awake early on a Saturday morning, A beautiful one.

Meanwhile the bread baking oven (built by students last year) gets hotter and hotter.

The dough is rising.

Meanwhile challenges are underway. Here is a creative one – making our own instruments out of found materials. Can’t wait for the performances.

These materials will be transformed into a violin. Seriously.

And stones collected from all over the world are assembled into a stone and sand garden of peace.

A collage is underway outside our maintenance shed.

The cold weather will come eventually, so students split and stack wood for winter and our wood burning stoves.

Wood sheds filled: One. Injuries: Zero (other than blisters)

Visiting the recycling shed for more materials for instruments.

Steam rises off our cedar shakes as the sun gets higher in the sky.

More kindling needed for our oven.

An impressive accomplishment. Marta, from Ethiopia, working with Lori in the kitchen prepares the dough to make cheese rolls for lunch. The dough weighs more than Marta herself. An amazing accomplishment to form all these rolls given that Marta is blind.

Meanwhile, another challenge is underway. Here students are running from the College to Victoria, a 30km run.

They did it. And another group cycled to Victoria and back.

Enjoying the locally sourced dinner.

Who doesn’t like locally grown Swiss Chard?

Local corn, chicken raised in Metchosin a few kilometers from the College, lentils and corn grown in BC. And hand picked blackberries boiled down into a syrup to go with Island Farms ice cream.

A peaceful end of day on the bay.

Our dinner menu.

And Alex, who challenged himself to capture this day on video created this for us.

A sweet day.   David

A walk through an increasingly sustainable campus

I took a break this weekend from developing this blog to see what I could capture as some real time visual examples to bring to light some of the things we are doing every day to be sustainable. Here is what I found.

First, we can see that students are no longer using trays. This saves enormously on the amount of water we need to use in the dining hall. Additionally, like shopping carts, sometimes trays were an invitation to pick things up that we could not really eat, producing more food waste and increasing our costs.

And here is a little reminder that it is better to err on the side of frugality ’cause you can always come back for more if you didn’t get the portion right. But if you take too much it turns into more garbage.

In the dining hall, we sort all our waste into two bins – items that can be composted or items than cannot be put into the composted (but might be recycled). We also weigh the total waste collected each meal – the waste bins are each on a scale – with an aim to reducing this over time.

We now have a tiny little Suzuki pick-up truck, which us mainly used around campus. This has dramatically reduced the need to use our heavy diesel-drinking Ford 350 Pick-up truck, which you can can see in white next to its diminutive new brother.

And I come across the construction of our new kayak dock. What does this have to do with sustainability? The wood is locally sourced and is milled at the William Head Institution, sometimes referred to as Club Fed, just a few kilometers along the shore from the College. Maya looks at the work as her father, Erik Schauff, our Seafront Manager, maneuvers our boat, Second Nature, preparing to pull the dock into the water.

Next stop in our recycling shed, where everything is looking tidy and ready to take on a weekend’s worth of recycling.

And on to our “Earth Tub”, Canada’s first use of the tub. Here is where we compost our food waste. Faculty member, Raphael Jenks, and his team of students in our “Growing Opportunities” activity have become masters of using the Earth Tub and we think we will need another one to keep up with the demand.

I couldn’t resist the temptation to look inside. Looks like a new load was recently added. Yes, it’s time for a second Earth Tub.

Now this is where things get tasty. The work of our wonderful composter turns into great compost, which the students then use to grow, at this time of year, our salad greens. A good looking crop given it is almost December and we are at 48 degrees North Latitude.

I see the bike shed door open and drop in to say hello to Amit, PC Year 38, from Fiji who is getting ready to take one of our bicycles out for a ride. We purchased a fleet of twenty bicycles six years ago from a generous donation from the parents of an alum. We are now ready to start rebuilding the fleet as we need about ten new bicycles.

Finally, on my way back to the main part of campus, I can see Erik about to pull the new kayaking dock into the water.

 

Making it Happen

If you have happened upon this blog. We are just giving birth to it so explore and watch us grow. We are about to use this blog as a tool to share and gather information on our work towards making the College more sustainable. We are using the “Oikos” Pearson College Sustainability Charter, developed in 2006-7 through 2007-08 under the leadership of two of our alumni, as a guide to holding ourselves accountable to do our part in fulfilling the UWC mission of making education a force to unite people, nations and cultures for peace and a sustainable future. Join us in our efforts.

David Hawley, Pearson College Director