We want to share with you some news about an exciting project that developed over the last few weeks. Back in November, we had some very special visitors to our site. We had invited teachers from four near-by communities of indigenous people along the Uatumã River to ATTO. Representatives of the Secretary of Education of Presidente Figueiredo, the municipality to which these communities belong, joined them on this visit. This was a fantastic opportunity to get to know our neighbors in the forest better, to tell them about our research and show them the observatory. Afterwards, we discussed over lunch how we can best collaborate in the future.
One of the outcomes was to arrange for our team to engage the youth in those communities. So, over the last two weeks, some of our scientists visited these local schools and presented our research. Prior, most students and residents hadn’t known much about our work and were amazed by everything they saw and heard. Some teachers have already asked about the possibility of further developing this partnership. One such option is to create school projects with an environmental focus associated with our research at ATTO. Additionally, we had a visit from the coordinator of the Sustainable Development Reserve Uatumã. He was impressed with the project and would like to expand the interaction to the other schools in the reserve.
We are very excited about this development. And we hope these visits will not only serve as a way to inform the whole community about our work but also spark curiosity for science among the children.
Impressions from the visits