Horticulture students head to Belize to show how gardens enrich schools (page down to second story) was one of the stories profiling projects demonstrating Cornell’s global impact in the Summer 2009 issue of Ezra, Cornell’s quarterly magazine.
The trip last spring was led by Marcia Eames-Sheavly and Christine Hadekel, and included 9 students and three three Cornell Cooperative Extension educators who together trained teachers and created two school gardens. They also led numerous nutrition, market, composting and basic garden-based activities for some 140 children and their teachers in two Mayan communities to help link the gardens to school curricula and community programs.
“We, as students, make our way through college hoping to find direction toward a suitable and desirable career, [which can be] difficult from hours of lectures alone,” says Neele Reimann-Philipp ’09. “It is the hands-on, practical experience that, I feel, can teach us these things in a more applicable way.” The course, she says, is an example of “one of the most valuable ways to connect what I’ve learned as a student with what may someday become my career.”