Environmental Extravaganza!

Guyana is currently experiencing a wave of environmental mania. Clean-up campaigns and environmental awareness activities are proliferating across the country. In my own community that has meant giving a number of environmental talks at primary schools, marching with the Environmental Health Office workers from Fort Wellington to Bushlot, and being involved in a clean-up activity in Rosignol. In addition to that, the Peace Corps Environmental Working Group that I started in January has finished compiling lessons into a workbook and finally staged its first workshop at Skeldon Line Path Secondary School located right on the border with Suriname.

Community Clean-Up
The Sanitary Inspectors for Region 5 worked alongside community members and representatives of local government (and me!) to clean up an empty lot behind some kiosks along the main street through town. A little over an hour’s worth of work makes a huge difference!

This is what the lot looked like when we arrived in the morning.

Trash was shin-deep in some places.

As we were preparing to get started, this volunteer showed up to gobble down as much as possible before his snacks got hauled away to the landfill.

The Sanitary Inspectors for Region 5 take a moment to pose for a photo before removing the trash pile that’s been an eyesore for central Rosignol.

All of the representatives from the Region 5 Environmental Health Office (my counterpart, the Environmental Health Officer, the Sanitary Inspectors, and me) wore shirts that say, “Let’s Keep It Clean.”

Hard at work!

The community pitched in, too. Even those who didn’t help directly with the clean up stopped by to voice their appreciation. The problem is so large that it can seem overwhelming, but once you get started and see how quickly you can make a difference, the issue starts to appear more manageable.

This guy just happened to be near the empty lot when we started, so he helped with the clean up and then dug a hole for the sign. The sign was actually donated by a nearby business owner, and the cement to secure it in the ground was donated by another local business. The community really wants to see change, and when everybody gets involved, you can see results much quicker!

Another community member who just happened to be in the area mixed the cement for the sign.

This trailer was empty when we started…

An hour’s worth of work makes all the difference! Of course the pig had to continue breakfast somewhere else…

First Environmental Working Group Workshop

This was the first Peace Corps environmental workshop of its kind in Guyana. Patty, a Volunteer posted in Region 6, arranged for us to stage the event at Skeldon Line Path Secondary School for about 50 students, and Kathrina and I traveled with her the three hours or so from our site to the border with Suriname. The school was very receptive to and supportive of our efforts, and the students were engaged from the moment we started; they really have set the bar high for future workshops!

Kathrina led off the workshop with a lesson on the effect of trash on Guyana’s waterways. The goal of the workshop was to connect the local environmental issues that students see everyday with global environmental concerns. “What you do at a local level can have global impacts!”

As an attention-getter to bring the students’ focus back to the front of the room, I used a chant that the Region 5 Sanitary Inspectors created for the march in Fort Wellington. I would yell out, “Go green!” If the students heard me, they would respond in unison with, “Keep it clean!” Usually two or three repetitions were enough to corral attention and proceed with the lesson.

Students of Skeldon Line Path Secondary School enjoying one of the day’s presentations.

Patty teaching a lesson called, “A Day as a Stray.” The goal of this lesson was to understand what life as a stray animal in Guyana is like and how stray animals can affect human health and well-being.

Students are sitting with “tokens” in front of them representing health, food, water, and home. After each round of the activity, the students would report out on how many of these tokens they found in order to determine whether or not they would have survived as a stray animal.

During the second round, once students realized that they would “die” without finding the proper amount of the tokens, the search got much rowdier. During the third round, they didn’t even wait for Patty to finish her instructions; a school bell rang, and they tore off through the room to get tokens before the other teams could grab them! Life as a stray can be pretty desperate…

In this activity, the students proposed reasons why they should or shouldn’t protect biodiversity. The open discussion that concluded the activity was especially interesting, with the students making a number of excellent points, that brought in their own thoughts and perspectives about the issue.

Students discussing protection of biodiversity in small groups.

In the final session of the day, the students learned about “ecosystem services,” a fancy term used to describe the things that nature does for us free of cost. They had to act out various ecosystem services using only pantomime, sound effects and a few minimal props. In this picture, the students are acting out photosynthesis.

In this example, the students were showing how vegetation could disperse wave energy to prevent coastal erosion. The hunched over students on the right were the wave. The made a swishing sound as they rushed towards the “trees” and then slowed down as they made their way between the “trees.”

This example was one that I thought was going to be especially difficult. The students had to act out the exchange of gases in the atmosphere. Their clever idea was to have one person act as the atmosphere while another pretended to be a plant. The third was a little animal, which was conveyed to the audience by the student making some yipping and barking noises. The “molecules of air” were passed around between these three “reservoirs.” Very creative! The amazing thing was that, even with the complex terminology involved in discussing ecosystem services, the students guessed nearly every one of the examples that their fellow students came up with!