Sado - Stone age cooking with school kids

The next day off was unfortunately very rainy, so since I wanted to do laundry anyway, I decided to stay indoors and snuggle up with a book on my futon. In the evening, two new participants arrived, and they are staying in my room. On Saturday, we have a full schedule ahead. We are assisting with a Stone Age activity where elementary school children learn about life in the Stone Age and why it was more sustainable than our lives today. Using some handmade wooden fire drills, the children try to create a flame. Since it's a very damp day, it doesn't work as well, and we resort to using a match for the cooking fire. We cook in a clay pot directly over the fire, but before that, we have to cut the vegetables. Someone had the brilliant idea to use stone tools for that. You would think that using a sharpened stone would suffice, but the stones look like someone just found them on the beach and thought, 'Okay, this one is a little sharp, I'll take it.' Since the children grab the stones first, we are left with the duller ones. And I don't want to brag, but I think I did pretty well. I received a lot of praise for the unbelievably useful talent of cutting a spring onion into strips with a 2 cm stone, and some people asked if I had done something like that before. Well, I have training in working with small objects, so I guess that helped. Half an hour later, we are finally done, and our fingers are sore and cramped. While we wait for the food to cook, we gather driftwood on the beach for the next cooking session over the fire. The children pass the time playing table tennis and tag. The finished soup tastes twice as good after all the effort, and it includes some ingredients I hadn't tried before. For example, taro root is a potato-like tuber, but it's much softer and somewhat mushy. After the meal, we go to the nearby campsite. We dig small holes and fill them with straw. The purpose is to prevent proper water circulation in the ground because it's sealed by concrete. The straw holes are meant to help old water evaporate better and new water to be absorbed more effectively. We spend about an hour and a half at the campsite and then return to the beach. After a short break, we want to collect trash together with the children. Since they were playing on the beach while we were digging holes, Nozomi calls them back to the beach kitchen using her microphone. We realize that we probably can't start cleaning up just yet. Most of the children are soaking wet and covered in sand. So they are sent to shower and change into dry clothes before we can finally begin. Despite the kids running around all day, they still have the energy to collect more trash than the adults. It's not as much as with the Tokyo students last time, but we still gather around 30 bags of plastic that won't be littering the beach anymore. As we did last time, we briefly discuss what we found. One of the girls is very sad about all the trash, and she only starts smiling again when everyone receives some candy as a reward. Hopefully, everyone here has learned the importance of reducing plastic as much as possible and can be more mindful of it in the future