Regrouping and Recreating

By Gael Thomas 

My second year at the Create Caribbean Research Institute was preceded by the Create and Code Summer Camp where we taught young children the basics of coding; creating websites with HTML, apps with MIT App inventor and games with Scratch under the theme of marine life and forest restoration.

Coming in from a summer of fun and learning, I experienced a series of rapid changes in a short period of time.

The first two weeks of my second year at Create Caribbean encompassed saying goodbye to a few Creators and welcoming new members to the family. At that point plans were being made for the expansion of the Carisealand project in collaboration with the Naniki project by Oonya Kempadoo.  All Creators would be involved in developing the project and would each have a specific topic to base their research on. Additionally, I was particularly excited about the plans to paint a representative mural on a wall of our Create Caribbean Office.

In mid-September, however, the Category 5 Hurricane Maria disrupted all of this, leaving many plans in shambles, destroying our physical Create Caribbean home and leaving me fearful of the future.

It was a few weeks after the hurricane that I was able to establish contact with my fellow Creators and the ball resumed rolling when we met for the first time at our adopted school, the Convent High School. There, progress on the Carisealand project was made when we shot videos premiering the topics of interest.  My aspect of the project focuses on Agriculture, Food Security and Water Security. Questions like “How do traditional agricultural practises encourage or mitigate climate change?” and “Do people worry about how secure or vulnerable their food or water sources are?” will be asked to prompt deeper reflection. These will fuel the discussion into the human and cultural view of the effects of climate change as well as to investigate and pinpoint what can be done as well as what is being done to safe guard these areas from the negative climate change effects.

Even with the setbacks of the limited internet access and the various challenges surrounding amenities such as electricity, my hopes are high for the end product of this project!