Last Saturday was scheduled to be Nicaragua's national beach clean up day. Unfortunately it had to be cancelled do to Tropical Storm Mateo. Today we participated with Barrio Planta Project (BPP) in cleaning up the beach in San Juan del Sur. All the students and teachers met at the beach at 7 AM this morning for instructions (don't pick up needles, dead animals, or glass). The event was supposed to go till 12. But it turns out that picking up garbage on the beach is really hard work and carrying a garbage filled bag up and down the beach is no picnic either. We lasted from 7-10:30.
Lots of kids from BPP showed up to help and clean. They are hard workers. The attitude about littering in Nicaragua (or at least SJDS) is pretty lax. People regularly just throw their garbage on the ground in the neighborhoods. Part of the problem is that when it rains, and it's been doing that a lot lately, the rain washes everything from the streets into the beach. There are also people who go to the beach and leave all their garbage.
Here are some of the things we cleaned up: Plastic baggies (used with a straw for drinks), straws, bottle caps, beer bottles, water bottles, a needle (specifically told not to pick them up but one kid did) candy wrappers, matches, grocery bags, cigarette butts, a tire, shirts, shoes, and tons of small pieces of plastic. We saw several dead fish; we were told not to pick up any dead animal, which was good information to have when we came across a dead puppy. We all filled up big rice bags with our trash and returned it to the truck that would carry it away. Our group was a bit slower and we ended up picking up mostly tiny garbage as others ran by with bags filled with plastic water bottles (one girl had 72 water bottles).
The organization running it (not BPP) supplied the bags and water. The water was in plastic, like a juice box but a sealed plastic bag. You just bite the tip off and drink (see photo of Bridget drinking). A couple of the local restaurants donated sandwiches and drinks and the use of their tables for the event (see photo of kids in restaurant). The organization running the clean up is tracking what they have cleaned up. Each of the team leaders (adults overseeing 3 or 4 kids) was given a form to fill out with no less than 30 catagories for garbage which we were supposed to tally. This is where it gets a bit senseless. These kids spent their Saturday morning working hard cleaning up garbage on the beach (most of which is from adults) and they wanted us to dump out the bags of garbage and count and categorize what we picked up. We just couldn't do it. We left early. We picked up so many tiny (dime sized) pieces of garbage that I wasn't about to pick them up again, let alone count them. I don't really understand why they need the kids to do that. I wish they had taken the garbage away and had other volunteers count it or even just weigh the garbage and call it a success. It just seems wrong to ask the kids to undo what they did, count it and put it back in the bag. Maybe that's just me.
All in all it was a good day of hard work. And that's how we spent our Saturday...
No comments:
Post a Comment