Help Us Recycle 5,250 Pounds of Plastic Wastes

Greetings,

We hope this quick message finds you well. Luckily here in Guatemala all of our team is doing well too and we are starting to get back to continue our work to improve our community. As the schools plan to open up in the next month or two we are planning to get back educating children on the problems with single use plastics, plastic pollution as well as on eco-brick making. This year we plan on having children in the schools to exchange eco-bricks in order to win a mural and clean up for their school. We are always looking for ways to engage students and at the same time to clean up and beatify our community. Attached to this message are some photos of our first school mural that we completed together with a Dutch artist Carin who is currently visiting Guatemala just last week. For the moment, future donations to this project will be used to cover the costs of the materials to realize our next school mural. In addition to improving the look of our community, each school mural will provide roughly the eco-bricks necessary to build 1 rainwater harvesting system (1,300) and will recycle more than 300 pounds of plastic trash. We look forward to sending you photos once our next mural is done.

Best wishes,

Colleen

We hope this update finds you well. Due to the unforeseen circumstances surrounding the coronavirus pandemic, this project has been temporarily postponed. We had planned to continuing working with students in our local area schools teaching them about the devastating environmental effects of single use plastics and encouraging them to make eco-bricks in exchange for items to enhance learning in their classrooms. However, our area schools will have reduced in-class time to reduce contamination. In addition, the eco-bricks we collect have typically been used for our rainwater harvesting project. Funding opportunities for this project are currently scarce. While we are awaiting relief from coronavirus related limitations, we will be working on building and carrying out traveling, educational, participatory exhibits for children in our community to enrich their learning. Currently more than 40,000 Guatemalan children have abandoned school during the pandemic, many in the communities we work in. Click on this link to learn more about this great project and how you can contribute: 

https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/play-it-forward-guatemala/.

As always thank you for your support.

Best wishes