A good day.

Once a month, NEPT (my agency) organizes beach clean-ups. This is pretty much exactly what it sounds like – a service event where we spend a few hours picking up trash from the beach. The clean up for August was scheduled for just 3 weeks after I started with them, and happened to fall on a day where my supervisor would be across the island for the entirety of the week leading up to the clean-up. This meant that I would be in charge of making sure the clean-up happened and happened smoothly. I wasn't sure if I would be able to pull it off, but knew I had to find a way to make it a success. Oh, and did I mention that we had practically no budget for the event?

The week before she left, my supervisor and I talked about what I would need to do to pull the event off. I wrote donation requests, sent emails, called people, and even Facebook-ed to advertise the event, organize the logistics and get prepared. I did all of this not knowing if it was going to be anyone but me at the beach that day cleaning up, or any need for us on that part of the beach, since I hadn’t seen the actual site yet.

The day of the event (last Friday), I was really nervous - were people going to come? Was there going to be work for them? Would we have enough supplies? Would someone pass out from the heat? But the day was fantastic. We had 20 participants - including 13 of the most motivated students I've met here, and 3 other PCVs. Together we picked up 50 huge bags of garbage - so many that we had to beg one of the nearby hotels for additional bags because we ran out of the supply we brought after only about an hour. We got a lot of "good jobs" from people on the beach, and it looked amazing when we were done. On top of all that, one of the participants was so impressed by one of the students that she hired him on the spot to work in her hotel. Everyone went home feeling productive, motivated, exhausted and even asking when they could come back and work more.

The whole day was a really great motivator. Working with an amazing group of students like that was refreshing – there’s a lot of apathy in the youth here, so it was nice to see another side. They’re a group that NEPT is going to continue to have a relationship with, so I’m hoping I’ll get to know some of them better. A lot of times with service programs like Peace Corps, the results of your work are intangible and difficult, if not impossible, to see. So a project like this one was fantastic – just take a look at the before and after pictures:

A shot of the area before

And after - what a difference, huh?

I did have a lot of help and guidance putting the clean-up together, but I was certainly the lead person for the event, and had done most of the background work myself. It felt amazing to have a successful day, and has given me the confidence to tackle an even bigger project in the near future, including our next beach clean-up in September.

The whole group with our 50 (!) bags of trash.

There are more pictures online: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=101129&id=636823325&l=bba5148742

PS - Gavin - I hope that was exciting enough for you, you jerk.