The Green School, Bali

Yesterday, I went to visit The Green School, a.k.a the Dream School (at least for me!). This school is famous for being incredibly sustainable in everything it does. With the Balinese rainforest as a backdrop and very much a setting for everything the students do, teaching and learning takes place in the world around the classroom as much as inside it. Speaking of classrooms, they are very much open to the great outdoors (no such thing as a window or door here!), and are mainly built from bamboo, a very strong and also sustainable material since it is very quick to grow, as well as traditional mud-brick and grass. Whiteboards are made from old car windscreens, chairs and tables are made from bamboo and the whole place has an outdoorsy, earthy feel.

The Green School run tours for the public daily and, if I’m honest, I was quite shocked at how commercial this seemed at first, especially as I was handed an earpiece so I could hear the tour-guide through her microphone. That said, it really shouldn't come as a shock that I’m not the only person in the world who wanted a sneak peak at how this school runs.

The tour was led by an ex-student who gave a very personal and quirky teenage insight into the goings on of the school. A local Balinese girl, she had actually been the recipient of a scholarship and spent her final four years of high school studying with privileged expat kids at the Green School.

We were taken around the grounds and introduced to the school’s sustainable ethos through a look at all the initiatives in place. There are no typical plates or bowls here - students eat from small, locally made baskets covered in a banana leaf which can be thrown away after each meal to save on washing-up and thus water. Students refill their non-plastic water bottles from a water station that uses reverse osmosis to collect water. The school also has its very own bird sanctuary where I was reunited with my old friend the Bali Stirling, incredibly endangered until a few years ago when the Friends of the National Park Foundation based on Nusa Penida helped their numbers grow from less than ten. Each class in the school is responsible for a vegetable patch that is irrigated and watered using water from the fish pond so that the fish can help fertilise the soil in their own way. There is also a mud pit where students can practice martial arts while being at one with nature (!!). The school has two cows so the manure can be added to the compost the school creates and used as fertiliser on their veggie patches. As part of a design project about bridges, 8th grade students built their very own bridge using bamboo over the river that runs through the school grounds and that, incidentally and adding very much to the atmosphere, contained four young local boys swimming and playing naked during my tour.

The school has dreams of being completely off the grid but has struggled thus far to make that a reality. A large number of engineers have visited and a lot of money has been spent on trying to create hydro-electric power from the river nearby but this has yet to be successful. Nonetheless, it truly is a wonderful place and definitely a place anyone would be lucky to work or send their children for a year or two. I did manage to have a brief meeting with a member of the administration and... let's just say that if I return to Bali for an extended period of time during my year off, I may well be back to visit this school.