Desafio Solar Brasil

Paraty

All work on the Museum has stopped because we have to organize the Desafio Solar Brasil. The race will take  place in Paraty in just one month and there is a lot to do. Of course, everything was left for the last minute. It’s a bit frustrating, but it’s ok, I am getting used to this way of working…

The Museum hasn’t completely stopped being active actually, as we are organizing the workshops that will take place during the Desafio Solar. The idea is to give the kids of Paraty the opportunity to learn about solar energy and renewable energy in general. As with all events organized by UFRJ-mar, our mother organization, the workshops for this ‘Festa do Mar e do Sol’ will be given by students from UFRJ. And we are entirely dependent on a bunch of spotty students who can let us down any minute claiming that exams are coming up and they have too much to do… This really scares me and makes me worry, but hey, this is how it works here…

Back in the days…

Wow, doesn’t this look amazing? This is what the Hangar, and the island, looked like in the ’50s…. It wasn’t an island! The Hangar was right by the sea and the Fundão island didn’t exist…

Opening Party? Finally?

We have postponed the opening of the Museum for the end of August, probably for the 21st August. It would have been absolutely impossible to get everything ready for the beginning of July, as we intended to.

We still need to clear out the Hangar, install lighting in the auditorium, set up the library, the marine biology corner and the boat construction area. We’re also going to move an old boat that has been abandonned for years, into the Hangar, and its restoration is going to be one of the activities/workshop offered by the Museum.

On top of this we also want to produce marketing material – a booklet and an accompanying DVD presenting the Museum.

Do we have time to do all this? If course, it’ll probably all get done in the last week before the opening!

With a good camera…

… and on a sunny day, this is what the bay near the hangar looks like.

photo Marco Fernandes – CoordCOM/UFRJ

Evaluation

We have to plan our evaluation process. Evaluation of the activities of the museum is going to be mainly questionnaire and interview-based, although we also want to use drawings to get to the children’s impressions and experiences in the museum.

Our front-end evaluation and formative evaluation are basically going to be carried out on our first group of students, planned now for the second week of September. These are supposed to be done before the start of the visits, or during the production of the exhibits/activities. We don’t have the time or resources to do these evaluations now, so we’ll just do them later, once we’ve got the kids at hand.

Formative evaluation should really involve the staff – the explainers and organizers of the workshops in our case – so we’ll try to get some feedback from them too. I am keen for this type of evaluation to include observation of the activities and other types of ethnological methods.

Summative evaluation will be done straight after the visit and a few months later, through in-depth interviews and drawings. Our aim will be to find out what the visitors gained from their visit, whether it changed their perception of the sea and their behaviour towards it (or is likely to).

The Marine Biology corner

One ‘corner’ of the hangar will be the marine biology corner. More than an exhibition about marine biology-related topics, it will be a sort of lab, with benches, microscopes, specimens to observe, and of course, aquariums.

The group from LabCoest is helping us setting it up. Their lab is located in the hangar, and they have various projects including environmental monitoring of the Guanabara Bay as well as research on the pollution and evolution of the Guanabara Bay. They are going to produce posters for us – we’ve already ordered one on the structure and evolution of the Guanabara Bay – and they’re going to be responsible for the development of the marine biology workshops.

Party?

We’re planning our opening party… Not sure yet when it’s going to happen but probably between now and the 15th July!!! No no no, don’t be so shocked, such total lack of organization is normal here…

Two of our rooms need to be ready for the party. We’re getting furniture built by the Polo Nautico (where all our boats are built) and gave a kick in the arse of ‘our’ builders. Unfortunately, they’re not ours, they’re UFRJ-Mar’s, and that’s why they’ve been postponing doing work on the Hangar: because there has always been something more urgent to do. Now there isn’t. This is the most urgent thing on everyone’s mind.

Our boats…

Our whale-fishing boat 'Arquimedes'

Our MV-25, that has just been built, and on the left the 'baiacu', a small whale-fishing boat

The 'Polo Nautico', where our boats are being built or restored

That’s it!

We’ve officially invited our first group of students to come to the Museum! They will be students in their last year at secondary school (‘ensino fundamental’), 15 to 18 years old, all from the poor communities around the University, mainly from the ‘favela da Maré’. 60 of them. One class.

Only one problem: there’s another power shortage in the Hangar. And our builders haven’t done a thing. Nothing’s been done at all. Sigh.

The island around the Museum

I have already posted many of these pictures, but I feel I have to post them again. I want to show how rich and inspiring the area around the Museum is. It’s an island, in the middle of a huge bay, in a tropical country. Just stop to think about what this means. It means rich,verdant flora, full of life, millions of different forms of life.

Including human life, human lives that depend on this wealth, that have no other livelihood than this bay, than the fish they find in this water…

But that, in spite of this, and because of this, contribute to its degradation. They’re not the only ones, unfortunately, to dump everything unwanted into the bay. The whole city dumps everything unwanted into the bay – it’s been dumping sewage in there for years, factories have been throwing their chemical garbage in there for years… The process started long ago… Will we succeed in slowing it down?