Earth Day and Murals

This past Wednesday was Earth Day as I'm sure most of you know. For Earth Day here we trainees had a competency. This meant that we had to go into local schools and give environmentally friendly themed presentations to a class of students and do some activities with them. In addition, we had to have them help us with a mural.

I worked with Cliff and Alexis. We decided to do a presentation on basura (garbage) because it is a huge problem here. I'm not sure I have any pictures of it, but there is garbage everywhere. It's on the streets, it's in the water, in people's yards. Just absolutely everywhere. So we chose to do a charla (chat) about garbage. We worked with 8th graders. It went really well. The kids were helpful and really responded well to us. After the charla we had a garbage clean up that went really well. We picked up 28 bags of trash, although a few of them had an awful lot of leaves in them. We had made it a contest so of course the kids wanted to win the prize by having the most garbage so in the end we awarded the prices to the ones that hadn't put leaves and sticks in their bags. We also had the kids do a poster contest. They did an awesome job. Here's the posters they did about garbage clean up in their community.

These were our winners! On the left is the school director and on the right is their teacher.












As another part of the project we worked on some murals for the school. We did one of the water cycle that we worked on with the 3rd graders and then we touched up an old world map (and I mean old, it still had east and west germany and the soviet union on it) that some previous Peace Corps volunteers had done.


Okay, so I just like this picture of myself! I think I look pretty so I figured I'd share it with all of you!

Juan, me, Kevin, Andrea, Cliff, Yudi, and Alexis with our water cycle moveable mural.


Alexis, Kevin, me and Cliff with our world map mural!

Another view of the world map mural.