By Rodrigo Diaz Guerrero
Promoting and safeguarding the rights of boys and girls for a better world is a fundamental task in today’s society. This is one of the main premises with which sociologist Graciela Hernández Alarcón has worked for 28 years. She has worked with the Children’s Support Foundation and other organizations designing and developing various programs with the theme of fighting for respect and ecological education of new generations. The aim is for children to get closer to nature and be able to protect it.
Her projects have achieved their goals through manuals and training teachers to put these principles into practice in a playful way, and using interesting resources, such as art. “Boys and girls already know what the environment is, they know that we pollute, but nobody does anything,” she comments. “Teachers, parents, and society in general remain quiet and that inertia is precisely what we intended to transform.» She adds, “You have to focus the training on creating an awareness of childhood, make them part of their environment. We are a whole, if we affect nature, we actually affect ourselves.”
The management of conflicts and violence is one of the topics addressed in some of their workshops and courses. Fortunately, they are beginning to see good results putting the needs of children as the center of work to get closer to them in the best way—addressing their basic deficiencies to later communicate the importance of environmental balance, to stop living in a seemingly implacable chaos.
Hernandez continues, “Chaos does not have to be addressed with children in a specific way, because they live in chaos; that is their daily life. Everything is a permanent contradiction, everything is a lie; we find ourselves governed by banalities. Everything we organize and create is based on the hypnotic need to satisfy the unnecessary. What is really required is to live with nature and make children see that harmony must prevail in an already deteriorated world.”
According to the ideology of Hernández being immersed in the dysfunctional is not so bad, because chaos is the greatest opportunity for reconstruction. “We are all different, we are always changing, just like nature,» she declares. “Because of that, precisely, we need each other, to achieve a metamorphosis despite the irrational exclusionary position of seeing the world promoted by the factual, political, and economic powers. Because for them, what is truly important is that people know how to use a cell phone and watch television,” she adds. The group of the excluded and the “non-recyclable elements of society” —as if they were garbage— is determined by their lack of consumption. Until now, the formula for success for a social complex like ours has been the marked distinction between those who are excluded and those included. It will not be otherwise until the desire for regeneration is born from within ourselves. The capacity to love, think and rebel is infinite in human beings, says Hernandez. She has deep hopes for the generations she now protects, because she is sure that they will know what to do. With the hope of inspiring others, she expects that we will eventually rebuild a society together and make it a better and a fairer one.
