How it all started
(as told by our coordinator Marta Lucia Vidal)

The visit of our beloved Swami Sarveshwarananda Giri to Medellin on August 14th, 2007 marked the beginning of the activities of the Ark of Love at the Integral Education Center of Las Cometas, in the Granizal neighborhood, with the participation of approximately 300 children.

This institution serves around 700 children in two shifts—one in the morning and another one in the afternoon, from kindergarten to primary school; in addition, it has other programs for older children who due to other circumstances have no access to school. The institution also provides lunch to all the children.

On October 10, 2007 the volunteers of the Ark of Love offered a first training to 13 of the 18 teachers who work at the institution. The training was oriented towards creating a Program of Interactive Listening to Music, a methodology designed to facilitate human development in both teachers and children, improving a child’s capacity to listen, increasing his attention and concentration, as well as offering him an experience of being immersed in harmonious musical sounds—thereby providing an opportunity to live in the present in an atmosphere of love and peace, which noticeably reduces outbreaks of violence in classrooms.

Teachers were assigned personal and team work on the subjects studied, oriented towards personal development and application of the techniques learnt in a particular area of teaching.
The work began this year in the month of March with the evaluation of the applied methodology. We shall give monthly training in pedagogy to the teachers using an educational model enabling the teachers to address the needs of the children according to their age, as well as how to deal with the problem of violence to which they are continuously exposed.