Extra-curricular activity. Mothers, fathers and children meet to get their hands in the dirt

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The Bicycle Trains - which leave from different points in the city every week, transporting more than a hundred students to school - promote spontaneous initiatives here and there that go beyond their primary objective. Workshops where youngsters can learn to repair their bikes to vegetable-growing experiments. Just like the trainsAll it takes is the will of mothers, fathers and children to mobilize locally.

Photos courtesy of Sarah Afonso's Bicycle Train

This weekend, the Sarah Afonso's Bike TrainThe school, located in Olivais, decided to go to the vegetable garden and plant sweet potatoes, padrón peppers, cabbages, okra and lettuce. Young and old got together in the parish's vegetable garden, located next to Vale do Silêncio Park, to get their hands in the soil. In a month's time, they'll be able to come back and harvest some of the vegetables they've planted.

"It's also a way for them to understand that the bicycle isn't just a means of transportation for going to school, it can also be used in the parish and in the city to get to various places - in this case it was to go to the vegetable garden!"the mothers and fathers of Sarah Afonso's Bicycle Train explain to Lisboa Para Pessoas. "As the garden is in the parish, the children have the opportunity to stop by whenever they want and watch what they've grown over the next few weeks."

Just as cycling allows you to get directly involved with the city, with its sounds, smells and sensations, urban agriculture also allows you to enhance the territory in which you live. "Children learn to respect nature, understanding that everyone depends on its limited resources", say the families who organized this meeting, where the children were also able to experience "a spirit of cooperation and community, in a healthy and fruitful conviviality, not only with their peers, but with people of other ages from other mothers, fathers to grandparents, neighbors".

"For this activity we have to thank two neighboring gardeners, Amândio Paulino and Rodolfo Gonçalves, who enthusiastically accepted the proposal of the mothers and fathers of Comboio and are preparing the planting, giving up their space in the garden and their time to help make the initiative a reality."add the mothers and fathers.

The activity of the Sarah Afonso Bicycle Train can be followed on the respective pages of Facebook e Instagram.

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Mário Rui André

Journalist and editor of Lisboa Para Pessoas, a local newspaper about Lisbon and the metropolitan area. I have 30 years living in the capital and 10 years of experience in media, having co-founded Shifter, an independent and reference magazine about technology. I studied advertising and marketing at the Escola Superior de Comunicação Social and, later, journalism and communication at the Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Coimbra. I write about Lisbon and about cities, mobility and urbanism in general. I follow a more human vision of the public space, and I am for citizenship and transparency on the part of governing bodies.