This week we started off with a wonderful art workshop with the kids in our community. They used all the colorful trash we picked up from the beach cleanup to make fun works of art. It was great to see how excited they were to learn something new! We find it really important to educate the children about the importance of recycling and how the trash impacts not only the environment but our health as well. We hope they go home and get their parents and families excited too.
We couldn't have pulled this workshop off without help from our community. The local community folks got excited and provided tables and chairs. Our neighbors Yvonne and Gary Tiedeman hosted the event. Rachel Stickley with Tropical Contento facilitated a beautiful workshop with instructor Patty Larin and shared her passion for teaching recycling and crafts. The kids learned a lot, and had so much fun!
After the art workshop, we spent some time packing eco bricks. It isn't a glamorous job but time flies and we watched a movie while we did it! The issue with eco bricks is that it is super easy to find plastic bottle pollution but not so easy to find the soft plastics that go inside. We were able to fill five plastic bottles with two bags of trash we had but we need thousands for this project! Luckily we still have a massive bag of ocean trash to fill more bottles with but a lot of the styrofoam needs to be cut into smaller chunks to fit into the bottles.
We have two different schools interested in implementing an eco brick project with the students and that could make a huge difference in our progress. We sent our ecobrick lesson plan guide to them in Spanish and English and hope this will be the beginning of a beautiful new partnership.
Back at the farm this week we had to do a little backtracking. Last week when we went to work on the project they hadn't truly leveled the foundation before placing the tires. We packed three tires before we realized that it wasn't perfect!
This week they were just about done leveling when we got there. We had another load of gravel delivered, and so far we have had to get 10 meters squared to do the foundation work. We are hoping we won't need any more as it is a more expensive material cost for us.
We were able to get 10 tires packed with gravel this time. Each tire holds about 5-6 buckets of gravel inside once it is packed solid and they are estimated to weigh over 300 pounds each! These tires really don't budge at all and will be perfect when an earthquake comes along. It will take approximately 50 tires to do the entire foundation. We hope the guys will be able to finish this without us this week but labor in El Salvador is tricky. A lot more gets done when you are there in person, but this land is two hours away from us so it has been tricky to balance our jobs with our passion project.
Luckily we have found a few volunteers thanks to our Expats in El Salvador Facebook group and are trying to line up a day where we could get a lot more work done at once. We would like to hire more people but we need help fundraising! If you would like to donate, it only takes $10 to hire someone for a day of labor. Do you have $10 to spare?! https://givebutter.com/elsalvador
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