5. Education: The right way to make a change
Help Wanted!
The whole process of cleaning the river and making a positive change for the environment is an effort that has many steps and can get together a lot of different people. We took the first step by doing the cleanup, but we needed to get going, so we got in touch with people from our local goverment agency. That's how we met the Aida Rosario, Director of the Peñuelas Recycling Program . She helped us get the truck that picked up the trash to get it to the recycling plant. That way we took a step forward to make a change, because that way we can transform our garbage into other useful products.
Time to recycle!
| Here are The River Watchers Squad with the Municipal Workers that are throwing all the trash into the recycling truck. |
Almost done! | Here we are with Mrs. Aida Rosario, the Director of the Peñuelas Public Affairs Office in charge of the Recycling program. |
Phase 3: Finding a solution for the problem
We noticed that part of the problem was there ere not any trashcans near the are where students gather. So, the need for those were obvious. We were taking with our coach, Mr Gonzalez, that wanted to buy them, when suddenly our school Councelor came to us with a much better approach to it. She told us that her husband works at a factory where they give away containers to the community, so they can be reused. She made a call to her husband and in less than an hour she had all the paper work done for us.
So, we went to San German to the Henkel company to pick up the container we could use as trashcans in our school and the for the community. We asked for five and they gave us eight. Way to go! Thanks to Yolanda Pacheco, our school Councelor, who helped us. Definetly we noticed that with a little push good efforts and environmental movements can be contagious!
Let's get all infected with the goodwill bug!
We want people to stop throwing trash in the ground and the river!.
From simple containers too possible solution: TRASHCANS
| Here we are helping getting the containers on the truck. | The River Watchers with Mr. Edgar Agrant, Henkel Pharmaceutical Plant Manager(the one who got us the containers). | Here are all the containers on the truck and we were ready to leave. |
Art with a meaning
We did'nt just wanted boring ordinary containers, so we decided to paint messages on the containers to make students and the community aware of the importance of keeping our rivers and the environment clean. The River Watchers Squad helped us with the art work and even though we got more paint in our hands that on the art work we finally got it toghether and did a great job.
Green Art!
| Not all of us are pretty good painters... so we used a video data projector to draw the art in the containers. | STOP!!! Picture time. | Teamwork... |
From simple containers to environmental trashcans.
| Here are part of the River Watchers Squad posing with there work. | This was the art made by one of he River Watchers Squad, Veronica García. We liked it so much that we decided to use it as the logo for the whole project. |
More students from the River Watchers Squad posing with their containers. |
The proud artists showing their Green Art
| Here we are with The River Watchers Squad and our coach, Mr. Javier Gonzalez. | We placed the trashcans in specific places. Such as this one by the riverside, where students gather to eat snacks. There was no containers here before so we did cleanup a little first. |
Time to give!
| Here we are with Mrs.Aida, the owner of the van that sells snacks in front of our school. We decided to give one of the trashcans to her because most of the food wraps found comes from things she sells. She gladly accepted it! | Here we go on our way to one of the other street vendors near our school. | This is Mrs. Renata. She owns the other moving van from where she sells snacks to students. We targeted those areas because these are the ones closest to bridges that students have to cross to get to school. She liked it so much that she wanted to take it home! |
