Twas the Night Before Earth Day

We’ve been in our village for three days now. Time is definitely moving faster and faster. I was totally shocked this afternoon to realize that we only have a month of training left. We’ll swear in on May 19th, inshallah. We’re two thirds (more or less) of the way through. Humdullah!

Today was an easy day at “school”; because we’ll be working tomorrow, doing Earth Day stuff while we’re supposed to be having a free day, we took this afternoon off. However, we still have plenty of work to do: finishing up the writing of the project proposal for Peace Corps, which B** has done the lion’s share of (Thanks, B!); preparing an environmental education activity in Tamazight, which we'll present to each other on Tuesday; making sure everything is ready for tomorrow. Since we all have found that it’s hard to focus on work at our host families’ homes, we decided not to tell them that we had the afternoon off, and just stay at school, working independently.

Tomorrow is pretty solidly planned – we’ve all been assigned our roles, learned our parts, and prepped everything we could think of – so all we really did on that front this afternoon was tell a few more kids that we had an Earth Day Game for them, so they should join us at the soccer field at 11:00 tomorrow. :)

Our itinerary for tomorrow:
11:00 – Who are we, and what is the Peace Corps?
11:10 – What is Earth Day, and why do we celebrate it? (This one’s my section.)
11:15 – Rules of the game
11:20 – Play!
11:50 – Designate a winner, hand out prizes
11:55 – Debrief, aka What did we learn today?
12:00 – Send the kids home for lunch, and/or play soccer with them for a while

Without further ado… What is this fabulous game we have lined up? We don’t have a name for it, but it’s basically “Competitive Trash Pickup”. Our beautiful village is sullied by the plastic and other biodegradable trash that is littered everywhere. Most households burn their plastic trash periodically (also not a fabulous solution), but littering is epidemic. So…we’re going to do something about that. We’ve invited all the kids we have access to* to come to the soccer field tomorrow, with all their friends. Boys and girls. We’ve specified that repeatedly. We’ll bring four or five laundry tubs, split the kids into teams, and then tell them that whichever team puts the most littered trash into their tub wins. They’ll have half an hour – just about enough time to go all over town, or even down to the fields and back if they want to – to gather as much trash as they can. We’ll give them a couple of mikka bags to get them started and to hold the litter they find, plus there are dozens of them in the brush of the cemetery, which is next to the soccer field. (And don’t worry, we checked with the imam: although walking through a graveyard is generally not a great thing to do, if your motive is to clean off the graves, it’s entirely hallal – a good thing that will bring you rewards in heaven.) Then they’re off to gather as much trash as they can assemble and bring it back to us. We’ll pack it out to the souk town, which actually has trash pickup (unlike our village), and advise them that they should do the same. Who knows if they’ll go that far (pun intended), but at least it will beautify the town and pull pollutants from the ground and water. It will also raise awareness of environmental protection, which is one of the primary goals of Earth Day anyway.

* We can’t get into the school. We have a letter from the Ministry of Education saying that every school in the country is obligated to work with Peace Corps Environmental Educators (aka us), but the school director in our village is refusing us access, anyway. His rationale was that his name was not included on the letter – it was a form letter from the Ministry – so it’s not binding. He wants a letter from the regional government, addressed specifically to him. We got the runaround from the regional government, too, but eventually they said that they faxed him a letter. When we went to talk to him again, he was gone. One of our gaggle said that he is responsible for three schools, so could be at any of them. An adult in the community told us that he’s winding down his tenure here, and is about to leave for a bigger and better-paying position, so he’s just marking time until he can leave. This may not be politically correct to include, but so be it. I’m not drawing any conclusions about Moroccans or even Moroccan politicians; I’m just saying that this particular individual has expressed no interest in working with us, has refused to answer our questions, and has made it clear that he does not want us in his school. If we were going to be here for the next two years, it would make sense to keep trying with him, but since we have about 10 days left in this community, we’ve made the executive decision to use our energies elsewhere. It’s a lesson to us and to the rest of the environmental sector (all of whom have heard about it) that just because most of us have been given carte blanche in the schools doesn’t mean that every official we need to work with will make our lives easy, and that there is a reason for the Peace Corps’ trademark “patience and flexibility.” Long story short: we can’t hold any Earth Day activities at school, so we told our host families and our gaggle that we had a game for them and all their friends on Sunday (the only day of the week when there is no school), and we’ll make it the best Earth Day we can. Safi.