Garbage Poster

Blogging is hard. Since I am in a small village with no internet there is really nothing to talk about except other people. For real. It’s a bit hard to discuss books in depth if everyone is reading a different one. There are no newspapers in sight, in Shqip or English and I can’t understand the tv news. I now know why the rural radio is so efficient. Why not gossip?

As I listen to the dogs bark outside and know I’m going to wake up to one very annoying Roster at 6, I can’t help but to think that I am so disconnected from the outside world. I would kill for a NYTimes or Wall Street Journal. Hey, I’m not picky. At this point I’d settle for a NY Post or Daily News. I’m started to miss the headlines reading “Hizzoner”. I hope I can find the time to spend a few hours on the internet tomorrow reading current events.

Given that situation, compounded with the fact that we didn’t go to Elbasan for technical sessions this Tuesday, I am really enticed to devote this blog entry to my site mates. However, I’m going to resist and find other material.
For starters, Rina is really getting into working out. Now that we’ve crossed that bridge- I truly believe she’ll keep it up while I’m gone.

Second, our Community Development Project (CDP) is rapidly approaching. Today is Thursday and our village earth day is on Sunday. This is the project we in Shales have been working on for the past 4 weeks. At this point we will have 3 separate stations run by each of us. One booth will double up and one person will be overseeing the event, jumping in to help whosever needed help at s/her station.
Kristine and I are doing a station on river pollution. We cannot teach the community not to through their trash on their landscapes because there is literally no alternative but we can teach something important: Don’ t throw trash in the river. Granted, pollution is way more complicated than that, but for a town which cannot afford dumpsters or garbage collections because so few people pay taxes, teaching people to through garbage in the trash receptacle is nonsensical- there simply isn’t one. Telling people to get a job- when there are no jobs- so that they have money to pay taxes so the Kommuna has money for sanitation collection and dumpsters is simply not going to happen. We are guests in this community and must remember that. So, we thought we’d teach something doable: Educating students on the perils of through trash directly in the river.

We believe a session on River Pollution will be very productive because there is a belief here among some people that the river belongs to the state and therefore one should throw garbage in it. On a personal not, my interest in water pollution has increased greatly since I found out I’ll be working for an Environmental organization at the beach. In fact, I learned that about 80% of all pollution on the beach originated from water ways not litter bugs at the beach. Additionally, many children here and in America simply have no idea that when you pollute the river you pollute your drinking source.

This morning Kristine and I outlined our lesson completely. We will be teaching about the decomposition rates of plastic, the htazards of river pollution and what happens to the materials when they are thrown in the river (where does the die go?). After asking questions to the kids, we will all make a collage with the partially decomposed objects we found near the river to visualize what we are drinking.