Introduction

Hola! I am Paul Ravensbergen. I am a third years student of Wageningen UR and this Thursday, the 7th of August, I will leave the Netherlands for 4.5 months to head for Mexico to do my internship there. You might think, huh? An internship? As third years (bachelor) student? For my study, international land and water management, it is obligatory to already do an internship in the bachelor in order to get more international experience. So that’s why I and a lot of other study mates (maybe they are WURldexplorers as well) fly to different countries to work with themes as drip-irrigation, gully erosion, rain water harvesting, agroforestry systems or as in my case soil-plant relations.

I will be working with an organisation called Ecosur, which is an organisation that wants to contribute to a sustainable development of the southern parts of Mexico, Central America and the Carribean. This idea is of course very close related to the vision of Wageningen University. However, I am not here to write about visions of the university. I am a WURldexplorer to write about my project in Campeche. In this UNESCO world heritage city I will be involved in a school garden project in which high school students will learn how to make their own compost and how to grow their own medicinal plants by using that compost. The reason why Ecosur wanted me to do an internship with them is because they wanted someone to do experiments with the production of compost and the effect of this compost on plant growth to have a scientific basis for the teaching part. I am lucky to be that someone :). Although I have my ideas of how the project will look like, I still have a lot of questions of what I exactly have to do during a working day, so I hope to tell you more about that soon. Besides pictures of the project, I will of course also share pictures of my travels and other fun activities in the Yucatan peninsula.