Water connects everything: a Spanish teacher's visit to Greece

In October 2025, Maria Pilar Orozco from Algeciras in Spain travelled to the Greek city of Lamia for two days as part of a teacher exchange. She met up with her colleague Aggeliki Karageorgopoulou and other teachers from the 2nd Primary School of Lamia in order to discuss and extend collaborative projects between their schools.

Read about her experience here.

I was a guest of the 2nd Primary school of Lamia both days during my stay. On Monday 20th, I was introduced to the new director and I was invited to visit the school facilities. The rest of the morning I joined their 6th grades and we  performed several experiments related to the project that we are developing together. I was also interviewed by the students for a podcast that they are broadcasting about the problems caused by water pollution. After the school time was over, we had a meeting to plan how we are going to approach the last part of the project: water management. We agreed that their younger students could do a small survey about the amount of bottled water consumed in their town while their teacher will try to find out the consumption of tap water throughout the year. The idea is to collect data about the number of bottles sold in supermarkets. The Spanish student will do that small survey too but we will also collect data about the amount of water consumed and reused in the area, e.g. for watering golf courses.

On Tuesday 21st, I went back to the school to disscuss the other project we are also collaborating with, Pro Bleu, and how some of the actions that we are taking could be expanded to include the topic of water. In addition, as part of our project, I showed them how to log onto the Sentinel satellite data web page in order to capture pictures of the damage caused by water in a particular area.  After this meeting, I went to the 6th Secondary school of Lamia with which my school is collaborating in another project.

Following the teacher exchange visit, Pilar and Aggeliki plan to have monthly online meetings. Pilar was also inspired to organise a beach cleaning in her hometown and adopt her guest school's approach of participating in citizen science projects. "I think it is important", she writes, "to use these initiatives because these projects give the students a sense of community and allow teachers to share ideas to incorporate in their classrooms."