Yesterday we held an Agriculture project in the library to
pick up trash in the community and learn about why we shouldn’t litter. I have
been amazed since coming here at the amount of garbage you see lying around,
and the amount of people who will throw trash in the street without a second
thought. Ecuador is a beautiful country with a wealth of natural resources, but
a lot of people don’t seem to realize or care about the damage they are doing
by not recycling and by throwing trash everywhere. Our hopes with projects like
these are that some of our library kids will grow up with an environmental
consciousness, that they themselves won’t contribute to the contamination, and
that little by little the mentality will start to change.
The project turned out great, the kids in the library were
actually counting down the minutes until we went to pick up trash! This was
obviously helped out by the incentive of dessert for everyone after the cleanup
(the Summer Vols made dirt cake), but the kids were genuinely into it. Issac
came running down the stairs, trash bag in hand and gloves on yelling “vamos
a ayudar el medio ambiente!” (we are going
to help the environment!) The kids teamed up and ran around the street in front
of the library and the cancha
picking up all the trash they could find. We set up a table in front of the centro with a lovely poster made by one of the kids,
William, and caught the attention of some people walking by. Multiple people
stopped Nicole and I on the street to say it was a beautiful thing we were
doing.
After we had been out there for about an hour picking up
trash we called all the kids back to the table. Two kids who had strayed to
the other side of the cancha had to be
called multiple times before they finally stopped picking up trash. “But Profe,
there’s more trash over there,” they told us… we actually had to make them stop
so we could have our discussion. We asked the kids why there was trash
everywhere, and why we were cleaning it up. They had great answers for us, and
they all promised never to litter. We asked them what they could do if they saw
other people littering, and the youngest kid, 5 years old, insisted that he
would shout “que asco!” (gross!). Satisfied with the outcome, we handed out
dirt cake, convinced the kids that it wasn’t actually dirt, and watched them
fight over the gummy worms that were buried inside.
I know that we aren’t changing the world here, but I feel
good knowing that these kids at least have an awareness of the environment and
how important it is to take care of it. We can only hope that in generations to
come the rest of the world starts to catch on.
