A community effort

A group photo after cleaning up the trash in the streets of San Isidro.

The curiosity of children is contagious, but it seems to die with age.

In San Isidro, when one child appears with a plastic bag and a purpose, surely about fifteen others will follow. It´s a sense of community that only children are capable of.

Last Friday, we organized a small trash-pick-up activity along the streets of the town to teach the children about littering and to clean up about three years of potato chip bags and candy wrappers trapped in gullies, sewers, and pot holes.

After putting up an announcement in the one store in town, three children showed up at 2:00 p.m. ready to get messy. Within ten minutes, the rest of the town´s children came to see what all the fuss was about. Soon after, twenty children were scouring the dirt roads and grassy banks of San Isidro with plastic bags overflowing with trash and hands caked with dirt.  In just thirty minutes they collected 14 trash bags worth of litter, litter that these same children had contributed to, and they admitted it.

Looking at all that trash made me sick, because I knew it would only enter the atmosphere as methane, sulfur dioxide, and carbon dioxide.

Four days later, two children stood outside our property with shovels in hand, ready to dig a grave for the trash.  We´d invited them to demonstrate a more environmentally-friendly alternative to burning every scrap of trash and polluting the blue, mountain skies.

As we began to dig, curiosity served us well. By the time we were ready to bury the trash, about 7 shovels and 14 children taking turns with them were covered in dirt, singing Enrique Iglesias, and learning something new.

But we were slow. Eight year olds aren´t exactly the best at using a pick-axe, and ten year olds are a little weak when it comes to picking up a shovel-full of dirt.

Yet that day, a group of children working together, learning together, laughing together,  drew the rare curiosity of an adult. Busy with her eight-month-old baby boy, her corn fields, her five other children, and her jelly-making business, the last thing Lupe needed to do was come up to the house in her pretty green skirt and black heels and take up the pick-axe. But she did.

She broke more rock than 14 children and three gringos put together, the muscles in her arms straining, her black hair glistening with sweat on her temple.  We applauded her when the hole was deep enough, and she watched with a smile on her face as the children, two of whom were hers, jumped into the pit, dancing to compact the trash. She looked on as we covered it with soil, and as the children thought to plant a make-shift wooden cross and put white flowers on the grave of our community litter.

We always hope that the activities we do with the children will be passed onto their parents at the dinner table, but to have adults and children working together is the best way to get anything done, to learn, and to enjoy ourselves as a community, as a family.

As we were washing our hands, a few of the children ran off to climb a mango tree, and it began raining mangos. We sat around sucking the sweet, yellow flesh off the pits, chatting about what we learned, boasting together of our successful community effort, feeling closer than ever.