...another man's treasure

When you volunteer in a place like rural Guatemala, you expect that sometimes, you roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty.  But in my wildest dreams, I never expected to do what I did this week.  For the last three days, I have been working with several other volunteers, teachers of el Centro (the community center where I teach my art class), and 70 students to collect... trash. 

Most Guatemalans litter without a second thought.  In larger towns, the municipality cleans up pretty frequently, but rural towns remain lined with empty soda bottles and chip bags. Aside from being a sad sight, it leads to unhealthy practices.  People will swim in extremely polluted lakes, and the lack of general education of environmental matters can take a larger toll on the health and wellness of people in these villages.

As such, over the last three days, we aimed to teach children the importance of taking care of their community, while making the otherwise tedious task of picking up trash enjoyable.  By giving them some fun projects, we really inspired them to take care of their communities.

For one activity, we painted planets while learning that Earth is the only planet in our entire solar system that can sustain life; therefore, we have to make an effort to take care of our planet.  Here is the Earth, drying in a tree in the sun (with some other planets in the back):

On the morning of the second day, we really got down to business.  The kids broke down into smaller groups to pick up trash, and here's my group getting ready to start.  (They have plastic bags over their hands because we couldn't find gloves.) 

These kids were incredible, amazing, motivating and fun.  Despite the fact that it was about 90 degrees in the blazing, hot sun, my group ran around for two hours and collected FOURTEEN full bags of trash.  My job was to hold the bag as they collected it, and I was constantly running after them to keep up.  The kids collected trash by jumping into rainwater-drainpipes, climbing through barbwire fences, and even shooing away barking, growling dogs.  It was awesome!  In one of the funniest moments of the day, three boys hit up a goldmine when they found trashcans behind a store.  They were so excited to find it, which goes to show that one man's trash certainly can be another man's treasure.

Afterward, they had a big lunch as a reward for their hard work:

Although I was exhausted from the first two days, the last day was my song-and-dance - an art project where we reinforced what we learned.  The kids drew their ideal home - a beautiful place without any trash.  They also made huge posters with the lyrics to the song we had taught, and we gave them certificates for completing the Earth Day Program. Some pictures of the last day are below:

The painting process:

My group with their certificates and poster

(English translation of the poster: "We are the future.  We want a world without trash.")

The trash truck that we filled up to the brim, pulling away the waste of La Pista

The kids and some volunteers proving that we dirtied our hand in the cleaning effort: