Pease On Earth: Earth Week

I've thought about the environment a lot since I've been in Peace Corps. Not that I wasn't conscious of environmental issues in my pre-PC life, but living in the village makes separating the elements and everyday life impossible. Without air conditioning, central heating, insulated buildings, washing machines, clean tap water (or even Brita water filters for the non-believers), FDA-approved meat, dairy and produce or microwaves, the everyday first world conveniences that one by one put another layer of cushion between people and the natural world, village life has brought me closer to the elements and forced me to acknowledge their role. For me, this has been enlightening albeit frustrating and downright annoying at times. For example, when it rains, I know that almost nothing will happen. By nothing, I mean that no matter what the schedule was supposed to be that day, my classes will be mostly empty, most teachers won't come to school, the roads will be muddy, there will be far fewer cars on the road, and doing anything or getting anywhere is really difficult. If there's a string of nice days and all of a sudden one very cold day, again, almost nothing will happen. Azerbaijanis believe that sickness comes from cold so exposing yourself to the cold is not only uncomfortable but also irresponsible in the sense that you're risking you're health. Married women spend their time maintaing their households: doing laundry, cleaning, cooking--all without the conveniences most of us are accustomed to. Further, hot water is dependent upon the availability of gas, and electricity is often inconsistent. In a different strain, I know the milk I drink and yogurt I eat come from my neighbor's cow. The eggs I cook for breakfast come from a chicken coop around the corner. These animals live off the land as well as the food scraps and seldom animal feed their given by their owners. In the winter, I feel cold to my most inner bones, and in the summer, I dream about smoothies and fountain sodas with tons of ice. I'm digressing as I begin to think about food.. The point is that I've come to a better understand overall of how life is connected to the environment. Not just in the village, but everywhere. In some places it's just more tangible.

As Earth Week rolled around this year, I decided to engage my students with environment activities. As a whole, Azerbaijan has some serious environmental issues related air pollution, polluted water, inadequate waste management, a lack of recycling, and onshore and offshore oil pollution. However, on a day to day basis in my village, the most noticeable environmental issue is litter. I wanted to raise environmental awareness of my students in a way that could connect with and see how every individual plays a role in the environment. Below are some pictures I took of my village's trash site. While there is no official waste management system, the pictures below show the un-official "dump": on the outer edge of my village, near the bridge over the river that separates my region from our neighboring region. Some people dump their trash here, but getting here for most people requires a car. The more common way of disposing of trash is either burning it or throwing it on the street.

We started our Earth Week activities with one where students had to guess the decomposition times for an assortment of items: how long these things would sit on the ground if they're put there and no one ever picked them up again.

A plastic bag, a cardboard box, a banana peel, a plastic bottle, an aluminum lid, a leather shoe & a glass jar.

Next we did a nature scavenger hunt. Students had to find a number of items in nature with certain parameters. To conclude, they had to choose one of these items and write down where it came from, what it needs for life and what needs it for life.

For the next activity, I brought all the empty bottles, boxes and glass containers I'd been saving to school. I taught a recycling-themed conversation club. At the end of the lesson, students got to pick one recyclable, and their assignment was to bring it back as something else. The results were pretty cool--mostly piggy banks and pencil holders. The last one is my favorite.

To bring the whole week to a conclusion, I invited a guest speaker from Ganja to come speak to my students about an environment-related topic of her choice. I met this girl through another volunteer who worked with her as the leader of Ganja's environmental club. She's a fourth year university student studying energy engineering. She's also attended GLOW (a girl's leadership camp) as both a camper and twice as a counselor. It was impressive having someone so passionate about both her field and community outreach come and speak to my students in a way they could understand and bring some of these messages I'd been trying to convey all week to life. We finished with a trash pick-up around the school! I wish I could have captured the janitor's face when the kids came running out of the school, gloved, trash bags in hand, with more enthusiasm than you'd EVER expect from a group of people about to pick up trash. As the kids were running around like ants on an ant hill, shuttling pieces of trash back to their trash bags, she looked at me and asked, "What did you do to them??"