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.

Small Project Grants

Attention Azerbaijan Peace Corps Volunteers!!! Are you working on an environmental project? Do you need a little bit of cash for your project? If so, the environmental committee is currently offering small amounts of money (20M or less)in order to help you out. If you are interested in being considered for this please email one off the environmental committee members with a description of you project and what you need the money for. We hope to hear from lots of you!

sincerely, the EC

It’s for the Community and Me! Joel Robbins, Sheki

Last year a college student and I created a poster that said: “Keep Sheki Beautiful. You wouldn’t throw paper and trash on your floors at home, so please don’t throw candy wrappers, garbage and cigarette papers onto the streets or into the rivers of Sheki, which is the home of all of us.” It had a couple of photos, a local mosque and a sculpture.

One day I was walking down my cobblestone street and decided to pick up some of the trash along the way. My host brother was walking the other way and saw me. He kept saying, “Yox, yox.” I kept picking things up. Later I showed my family the poster. The said they liked it, but I noticed my brother taking the trash to the river a few weeks later. The odd thing is that there is a trash pickup point down our street the opposite direction from the river. Old habits die hard.

The central library let me post the anti-litter art in its window, I gave some to my college students, and I put a version in the college’s monthly newsletter. I also taped some on the stonework of bridges where people throw their trash into the rivers, but I noticed someone quickly torn them loose and discarded them.

One Sunday I went to the park between my house and the college and spent and hour picking up paper trash and burning it. That mystified some of the locals walking through the park. One child came and helped me a little while, and the female gatekeeper at the college happened to walk by and said in English, “Thank you.” I’m sure the word got around that the crazy American teacher was picking up trash instead of tossing it onto the ground.

A couple of months later, two teachers took their students into the park with weed broom/rakes and cleaned up and burned leaves and paper. I took pictures and a student wrote a caption to congratulate the teachers and students. We published that in the next issue of our college paper.

I know that’s not much, but you have to start somewhere. When I was a boy, we drove to a marshy area near a river to throw away cans and bottles, anything we couldn’t feed to the chickens or burn in our trash barrel at home, into the water. Everyone in my community used to do that before we had trash pickup and landfills. It will take AZ another decade to get to that point. We have a few trash pickup points in Sheki, but only about 1/5 of what is needed.