“Don’t forget that what we call reality today was yesterday’s imagination.” The El Fraile Citizen Participation group was inspired by this quote from the novel The Duplicated Man, by the Nobel Prize for Literature Joseph Saramagoto launch his latest initiative: a mural made by the 3rd year students of the College of Early Childhood and Primary Education (CEIP) El Fraile to portray how they want their neighborhood to be.
The Friar of the future is the motto with which more than 70 students expressed their wishes and needs through drawings relative to where they live. An exercise in imagination as a first step towards a reality that contemplates the opinions of children, with special attention to neighborhood coexistence, which arises from a previous activity proposed by this group of the strategy for intercultural coexistence in Tenerife, Together in the same direction, driven by council with the support of the University of La Laguna through its General Foundation and the Tenerife Immigration Observatory (OBITen).
Given the difficulties encountered in collect old photographs of El Frailewith which they intended to carry out an exhibition to increase the feeling of belonging to their territory and their community among the people who live in this town of Arona with a high degree of cultural diversity, El Fraile Citizen Participation decided that, if it cannot contemplate this objective by looking at the past, it would do so by looking to the future.
“We say that childhood is the future, but in reality it is the present. We want them to see that they can do something to transform where they live to where they want to live. It seems to us that all of us, the little ones too, should start thinking about El Fraile in a different way. From the outside, but also the very people who live here for generate a feeling of affection referring to this place,” explains Pilar Morales Abadía, a member of Participación Ciudadana El Fraile.
As a result of this process, the CEIP El Fraile now has a large mural that collects the concerns of their childhood to make the place where they live a community in which the intercultural coexistencein line with the goals of the insular strategic framework, Tenerife lives diversity.
At the inauguration of this mural that captures El Fraile del futuro, Citizen Participation El Fraile delivered the book Sona Mariama and other popular tales from Gambia to the participating students. A gift for your involvement, which has lin collaboration with the NGO Correcaminos Solidarioswhich has edited the publication whose proceeds from its sale contribute to supporting the Primary Education school they founded in Fass Chamen (Gambia).
“To people from another country, I would give them a present, I would play with their children, I would be their friend and we would go to their house to play with them,” explains one of the CEIP El Fraile students who participated in this activity about how you imagine The friar of the future and what he would do to welcome people who come to him.
The Councilor for Employment, Socioeconomic Development and Foreign Action of the Cabildo, Carmen Luz Baso, highlights that “it is essential to include the vision of boys and girls when managing any area of society, because we cannot ignore that they are not only part of the same, but they are the future.
