For the last 2 days we have been celebrating Earth Day in our community. We have slowly been working on planning these activities for the last couple of weeks. We spent a lot of time meeting with different community members including people from the two different associations in town, the school teachers and director and Felicie’s host aunt from a nearby town whom works with the women's center teaching arabic. There was a lot of back and forth and meeting that felt like we didn’t get much accomplished but in the end I think they worked out well as informational awareness meetings.

Yesterday, we arrived at the school at 9:00 to meet the kids and give our talk about Earth Day and 1 of the problems the community faces, which is trash. We prepared a poster of items that can be burned and items that should not be burned. After that we handed out flour sacks for everyone to go out and

collect trash. Unfortunately we only had 1 hole so we couldn’t separate into burnables and non-burnables so burying it all was our best option. The kids really seemed to have a blast running around collecting the trash and seeing it all in one big pile. Although we didn’t get to separate it I think we got the point across because today they were still talking about the things that shouldn’t be burned and the effects trash can have in general.

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Todays project was to plant the trees that we got and have the kids think about and draw what the environment means to them. The kids got really excited about having paper and pencils. Actually I figured they would all love to have the colored pencils but in fact they fought over the regular lead pencils with the erasers. Afterwards they all shared what they drew, some with us and mostly with each other. Just as we were finishing up the pictures the women from the community starting walking into the school grounds. To keep thing somewhat maintained Dave, Isabel and I went outside with the kids to plant the trees while Felicie, Cara, and Martin met with the women inside the classroom. We found out later that they ended up having a conversation about global warming and the melting ice caps. I’m sorry I missed it, but it was so nice to be outside with the kids planting trees.

Most of the hard work had already been done for us, as some men from the community had already dug all the holes and laid the trees out, so all we had to do was go around putting the plants in the holes and cover them with dirt, manure and water. It continues to amaze me how excited these kids get to be apart of these activities. Things like running back and forth to fill jugs and buckets with water is something they fight over wanting to do. I’m not exactly sure what is motivating them whether it’s the actual project at hand or just having something different to do. Either way they all participated and seemed genuinely interested.

Later on that evening back at home our host brother, Hamza, and host sisters Fatima and Najat all sat down at the table and drew pictures of the environment. And even though all the pictures consisted of the same people, trees, river, fish, birds and sun, the point was just to get them actively thinking about the environment and that was certainly successful.