Monday 11th September, 1pm: Martine, Sébastien and Gwenaëlle set up the room with smiles on their faces. They are in the technology building at the University of the French Antilles and they’re preparing for 40 first-year students to arrive. This is a huge milestone for fresking in Martinique: it took a lot of organising effort and raising awareness to get to this point. Karen is also in the room, here to observe the workshop, and Julien who will photograph this historic day!

1.30pm: The students arrive and file in. It’s their first day at university, and what better way to get to know each other than to work in teams to play the Fresk?

1.45pm: The workshop begins. There’s a flurry of tentative chatter about team names before the first set of cards makes its way onto the table. Then, they’re off! The students puzzle it out, a story starts to emerge out of the cards – the magic happens. Hands grab chalk, colours explode across the page and everything comes to life. They give their creations a name: ‘The pain of the world’, ‘Let’s change our future’, ‘Can we turn back the clock?’. 

3.45pm: The debate begins. A debate with 40 people is ambitious, but the students do very well. They present their arguments tentatively but clearly, making intelligent points. Some propose actions that the campus could take. Many reflect on how climate change could impact the course they have chosen to study.

4.28pm: Time to call it a day! 

4.30pm: There was no time to take a photo, as some students had a bus to catch, but we managed to take some video clips of the students and what they thought of the Fresk. This will help us spread the word about the event across the region.

On the way home, the Freskers debriefed and gathered their learnings:

1. The students were quite shy, but were generally engaged in the subject matter and worked well together;
2. The card game went swimmingly;
3. Some students were clearly very touched by the experience and spoke strongly about the issue;
4. We were glad that the room had air-con, as it was 33°C outside at 80% humidity (as it has been all through September in Martinique). The intense, humid heat is exhausting! We are reminded how long the road is to sustainability.

We left the building exhausted but so happy to have hosted this first workshop in education. The team from the university were delighted with the event, too! To sum up, as our organiser Martine would say: it was SUPER GREAT!