Ganja Riverbed Clean Up

Ganja Riverbed Clean Up
By: Bonnie

A group of Ganja youth came together to cleanup the Ganja Riverbed on a rainy day in early April 2009. The student group included university students from the economics faculty of the Azerbaijan State Agricultural University and students from the Ganja Vocational Training Center. Peace Corps Environmental Committee supplied a small incentive grant for this activity and the University provided much of the equipment and supplies. Approximately 50 students (boys and girls) participated in the all day event that collected nearly 2 city dump trucks of trash from the river near one of the main bridges. The day finished with a party celebration at the Economics building of the University. Bonnie Campbell PCV AZ6 met the 2 leaders of the group at her organization - the Ganja VTC when they attended her English Enrichment and Conversation Clubs. Three other Ganja PCV's were on hand to participate in the cleanup. Thanks to Tor, Linda and Margaret for their help with this project.

The SIFE committee from the University has taken this project to Baku for a presentation and will be going to Berlin in the fall of 2009 to present what they have done for the environment in Ganja.

Pictures attached show the mess before and the cleaned up area afterwards. Asgar and Eldar are the 2 students that planned this project and I am proud to know these two young leaders from Ganja.

Barda Earth Day Extravaganza

Barda Earth Day Extravaganza
By: Meredith Ebenhack

For Earth Day in Barda Bill, Lexi, Jeremy and I, along with our Azeri counterpart, Famila, hosted an environmental educational day. We picked three important topics to focus on, water conservation, energy conservation and trash disposal. We then created a 30 minute educational session on each topic focusing on the facts and practical steps they could take in their lives to help address the problem. In addition, we created skit for each topic, with a focus on making them not only educational but also interactive and funny. We picked three of our local schools to participate, and asked each school to pick 10 6th form students to attend the educational day. Each school was given one of the plays for the 10 students to practice and learn individually and then perform on the day of the training. The plan was to have each school start at a station and then rotate every 30 minutes until they had covered all the stations. They would then be given a short break to have a snack and prepare for their skit to be preformed right after the break. It would all last from 10am until 12 or 1pm, and include 30 or so students, 3 translators, one for each section, and an assisting teacher from each school to help maintain order. In order to make sure everything ran smoothly we spoke with the director of the sports and youth ministry and invited someone to attend. One of our participating schools allowed us to use their school to host our day and we received 20manat from the environmental committees in order to pay for material and snacks for the kids.
On the Big day, with the exception of a few minor hitches, everything went as planned. And as a whole it was a great success! We got som much appreciated extra help from Ryan and Johanna. The students really enjoyed themselves and amazingly stayed focused and interested through every session, with some attention span to spare, and the plays got lots of laughs. They had a great time and learned a little while they were at it. As a closing we presented each school with a certificate for participating and took loads of pictures. It was such a success that we hope for this to become an annual and growing tradition, with more schools and more hands on participation from our Azeri counter parts each year. Though there will be some tweaks here and there for next year, if anyone is interesting in doing a similar project in their community look for a detailed outline of the project and sessions at the environmental committee’s Google group in the near future.