One of the main achievements of GVI in 2007 was to build a recycling centre for plastics followed by some environmental education in schools to encourage children to separate garbage and some promotion in town in order for people to use it. The centre was then donated to the community and a committee was supposed to maintain it and outsource a company to come and pick up the plastics. Unfortunately lots of politicians in Mexico tend to talk a lot but not do very much. Anyway this is a long story but to make it short the centre is still used by people which is good! The Municipality of Playa sends us a truck every month to pick up everything there. Unfortunately we have to do what we can to maintain it and I have seen quite a lot of crazy stuff happening there like when a circus came in town (which circus I didn’t forget to denounce to my friends at Born Free as they were using Siberian Tigers…in Mexico!! Imagine these poor tigers in tiny little cages!! Anyway lets get back to the subject for now!…) well the people from the circus didn’t find a better idea than hanging their clothes on the gates of our centre! Then another day some horses had found shelter at night as I could recognize horse shit all over! And yesterday we had goats visiting! Oh well, It’s Mexico! …as I tend to say to myself often!
We’ve given another workshop on recycling at the Julio Ruelas elementary school and we are planning a couple more in another school I made contact with. Each time we’ve implemented this workshop in a school we’ve donated a container for them to separate their plastics. We then pass by the schools once a week with our tricycle and take everything to the centre. Its still a little bit messy though as it takes a while for all the kids to understand and remember what they can and what they can’t put in these containers. But this morning as I visited one of these schools to talk to the Director about another workshop I was delighted to see how 2 kids were sorting out the containers and asking me lots of questions about what they can and what they can’t put in there. Then they were asking about the paper, the cans, they were so keen to get these recycled too…..So this would be the next step, get these 2 schools to recycle not only plastics but also glass, paper etc….We are working on this second phase!……..
