Blog

Name: Dr. Gerardo Avalos
Position: Center Director
Program: Sustainable Development Studies, Costa Rica

We are about to finish our season of community projects as our semester is coming to an end. This Saturday, all of The SFS Center for Sustainable Development Studies crew went out to do three outreach projects. The one in which I participated in was really cool.

I took my daughter Melissa, who is 10 years old, along with me to learn about community work. We were asked by the Primary School of Sabana Larga to paint a mural in the wall facing the main road going to Atenas. They wanted a scene with a landscape showing nature and kids playing and so we came up with a sketch.

 It was amazing to see the transformation of the original design into a mural by means of team work. We only had two and a half hours to complete the project. We started out copying the design on the wall, and making sure all the figures fit well into the space we had.
 Next, we started painting all sections, one by one, mixing colors, coming up with new and nice variations, and more details into the picture. Shreya Balakrishna, one of our students, set up a video camera that recorded all the action. It will be fun to see the movie playing in high speed motion, to compress two and a half hours in a few seconds… I guess you guys will have to wait to see it. At the end of the morning this was the final result of our efforts.

We are very proud of leaving such a beautiful mural painting for the enjoyment of the teachers and students of the Sabana Larga School. This shows concrete results accomplished in one morning by a group of very enthusiastic and talented students. This is what I call the “SFS muscle”.