I’m on a roll. With projects, with Peace Corps life, with ideas of life to come, almost everything. A project has dropped into my lap that could actually have a lasting impact on my community (whaaa?!) and I’m taking as many big man strides as I can to make sure that it’s sustainable.
Last week my days were full of brainstorming, proposal writing and sending e-mails in order to spread the word, get feedback and maintain organization as I attempt to turn Beeston Spring into a community that recycles (the first, apparently, in the country). I also wrote all but one proposal to claim the Best Community Competition funding for 2009 and started a 50 slide powerpoint for this years’ competition judging.
This week I hosted two new Peace Corps trainees in my home from Monday until Wednesday morning. I greatly enjoyed their company and I was glad that I actually have projects to talk to them about. It’s true what they say, you don’t truly appreciate your place as a volunteer until you share your experience with a newbie. I can cook uniquely tropical vegetables like cho-cho and yam, I balance my budget, walk between destinations with complete confidence, chat with community members effectively and many other things that were quite intimidating in my first month. After my very productive week last week and my busy first part of this week, mi feel tiyad an mi nuh waan tink bout ee nuh more.
Maybe the things I did throughout my last week would have taken a single day from an office with internet in the developed world. But here things take much longer, as is to be expected. I will never take for granted again the ease and speed with which work gets done when emails are sent, answered and replied to in a 12 hour period. I will also never take for granted the work ethic of Americans again. While it may be slowly killing some people, it’s so much more effective. Not to condone stress, but Jamaicans are practically allergic to the feeling. They physically react to it much faster than the average American, and try getting a Jamaican to work or attend a meeting if they have the sniffles (aka “the flu” here) HAHA no sah, nuttin a go so. And so, sometimes after periods of serious productivity, I pause, realize the speed at which my counterparts are working and instead of being inspired to work more, I feel inspired to sit and wait for them to catch up. Ahhh how the relativity of productivity varies in this country.
I spent three hours at Salem Primary and Junior High School today and I’m feeling quite spent. On Fridays I teach the 7th and 8th grade applied agriculture and I work with the first and second grades on enviracy. Today I had an additional agenda: to spread the word about the recycling project. And so, I went from grade 9 to grade 1 explaining the ground rules of the next few weeks for them.
On a Friday.
That was understaffed.
(…so classes were sharing teachers, teachers were switching grades and almost no one was in a seat). I suppose I’ll explain the project to you now too:
A few months ago the Sandals Foundation’s environmental coordinator told me that she had 6 old bleach bins that she wanted to donate to Beeston Spring to collect recyclables. While this is an admirable idea, it would never work unless an extensive educational campaign was launched, and what better way to do that than through the school? And so, I contacted a new company in St. Elizabeth- Plastic Recyclers of Jamaica- which collects bottles from communities and crushes them to sell to recycling companies in Foreign. After getting the info we needed, we began to empty out the abandoned building turned bottle storage building and filling them into huge 5’x5’x5’ bags. Plastic Recyclers picks up the bags for free and actually pays JD$4 per lb.
So I am now simultaneously working on the school-wide and community-wide education campaign. At the school, every grade will be competing to collect the most bottles (by lb) until May 22nd, when we will hold an after school “Beeston Spring Recycles! Fun Day”. The final weigh in and prizes will occur and then the students will paint their hand prints on the donated bins, which will then be placed in most of the districts in the community. The winning class will receive the worth of the final white bag once it is filled up to do whatever they want with (~JD$800 if they do it right). Needless to say, by the time the lunch bell rang, grade 5 and grade 6 had already collected more than three 26 gallon bags of bottles.
Meanwhile, I’ll be canvassing the shop keepers and other community spaces to educate them and invite them to a meeting where white bags can be handed out to those interested and questions can be answered by reps of Plastic Recyclers.
As I’m typing I’m wondering if I should just have explained this after May 22nd so that if it’s a complete failure I don’t have to write about it. But I just wrote way too much to delete and hey, failures are teaching tools too- a so ee go.
Plastic Recyclers of Jamaica came to Beeston Spring last week to collect the bagged up bottles. Here’s what the pickup process looked like:
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