At the Mbaracayú Educational Center (CEM) from the Department of Canindeyú, 49 adolescent girls received their Technical Baccalaureate in Environmental Sciences. The graduates come mainly from rural areas surrounding the Mbaracayú Reserve, in the Department of Canindeyú, also from San Pedro, Caazapá, Alto Paraná, and the Central Department.

The graduation ceremony took place at the Mbaracayú Educational Center from the Moisés Bertoni Foundation, located in the Mbaracayú Forest National Reserve which is in the Department of Canindeyú and has an area of 65,000 hectares. The 49 young ladies, self-styled daughters of the forest, studied with the self-sustainable educational model and the “Learning by doing, selling and earning” methodology of Fundación Paraguaya. In addition to receiving their degrees of Technical Baccalaureate in Environmental Sciences, they manage the “Mbaracayú Lodge” hotel, which offers first class service.

The best graduate of the 2021 class, Samira Ocampos Rotela, in her farewell speech, urged the graduates to embrace leadership in all aspects of their lives. “Fellow graduates, let’s project ourselves as leaders, as owners, and not as women who only follow. It’s time to break the love towards chains because we are winners and not of the things that are ending now, but of the challenges that begin. This was our training stage, now it’s our turn to grab the hoe and start clearing our way to success,” she said.

Yan Speranza, executive director of the Moisés Bertoni Foundation, reflected on the words pride and merit. “The word pride means a great feeling of satisfaction for something that is ours or something very close to us that is considered meritorious. Merit is something we need from our society. What these girls are achieving today, after three years, is based on the merit of each one, for which we are deeply proud”, he highlighted.

Hope

PhD. Martín Burt, Fundación Paraguaya’s CEO, was also invited to share a few words as one of the founders of the Mbaracayú Reserve and the Mbaracayú Educational Center for young ladies.

On the occasion, Burt urged all attendees to be grateful for the blessings that the graduates and their families were experiencing at the time and recalled that they should not forget that they are in a sacred and magical place.

“33 years ago, with the engineer Raúl Gauto, we told each other that there was a forest that was going to be sold and if it was sold it would possibly become soybean cultivation, that is why we said to ourselves: ‘Let’s buy it!’. That is how we began to buy silver all over the world and we found an electricity factory on the other side of the planet, which produced coal and; therefore, a lot of pollution into the atmosphere. That was how the people of that company said: ‘We want to mitigate and make up for the damage we are doing to the environment.’ Thus, the Mbaracayú National Reserve was born, thanks to the carbon credit, and today this is the only reserve that has not been depredated”, he shared.

He added that all that management was led by Paraguayan people, which means that we are capable of doing things. “When somebody tells you that something cannot be done in Paraguay, you can say that it is a lie because it can be done, we can do it! In perpetuity, the Mbaracayú School will continue to deliver top-level leaders like these girls, who are a guarantee for the department of Canindeyú, Caazapá, for the entire republic, because they are incorruptible, they came to the forest to train on their own merit, the bravest, in a sacred place such as these forests, where thousands of resident women died,” he said.

To conclude, PhD. Martín Burt stressed that Paraguay should not lose hope. “We don’t have to lose hope. Our job is to make a peaceful revolution in Paraguay, we need a group of brave people who say: ´I want 1000 schools like the one in Mbaracayú´; ´I am going to turn every ecological reserve in Paraguay into tourism centers to create jobs.´ We can achieve both, that each one of us flourish and that each one helps the rest of Paraguay to flourish. As Monsignor Ricardo Valenzuela said in his homily in Caacupé: ´Let´s organize hope´”, he stressed.