2. motivate the rotaract group and above all
3. motivate myself
If you read the beginning entries, you might remember me saying something about a project to clean up a hill called "Pan de Azucar" in Piriapolis. The hill is frecuented by turists and locals, and, partly due to a lack of trash service and partly to lack of education, the top of the hill is a dump filled with plastic water bottles. We started working towards a clean-up date but the weather went south so quickly we put it on hold indefinitely until the weather shapes up. Well, the weather is still out of shape. Imagine the following rectangle at a temperature of 40 degrees:
Looking from that angle you need to shiver a little bit more. Shuffle your heavy, rain-soaked shoes out of the tempting circle in the center, and you are about there! Winter here has made it almost impossible to even think about the possibility of cleaning up the hill, and it has become all to easy to forget about the project all together. In order to motivate all of us, I decided to write more about the project and put up some fotos. When everyone knows about it, the pressure will be on, and maybe we can get into gear. The idea: bring together Rotaract in Montevideo, Interact of Piriapolis, and a group of school children. Make a day trip to el cerro and clean it up, providing positive role models for the kids while involving them in creating a greater social concious of the environment. A bonus would be to arrange something with the administrators of the land or the municipality to establish a permanent trash collection service. That said and done, bring on the fotos! (Don't be fooled, these fotos were taken in the summer...that sun is dead to me :P.)At the beginning of the hike in the zoological section, there are some neat plants that I had never seen.
As the trail works its way up the hill, plastic bottles seed the trailside. At the top, there are literally deposits of plastic bottles. One picture is enough to get the idea.
Trash on the ground contrasts a lot with great views if one can forget about the countless bottles and raise his or her eyes to the horizon.
Great! Now I've talked it up. We've got to do it. Hold me responsable and ask about Pan de Azucar when I get back. Thanks for your support =-DNow for the good news; the temperature is slowly rising, it's raining a little less, and sometimes the sun comes out to shine. I'm taking that as a sine that we're on our way up!
