Peace Corps | Around Peru in 800 Days: April 2014

EARTH DAY!!!!!!

My favorite environmental day!!

Hope everyone had a happy Earth Day wherever it might have happened, and did a small environmental positive action. I used to remember Earth Day because of all the Disney Nature movies that usually come out during that time, April 22. Love those movies.

Well to start off, I wanted to celebrate Earth Day in my community by doing something a bit bigger, but I had timing issues and went with the most effective and simpler. The week before Earth Day Semana Santa happened, that is a big week for Latin American countries. My group of Peace Corps Peru 22 had planned our first vacation to Mancora, one of the nicest beaches in Peru. Thus, it didn’t give me enough time to coordinate with schools or other organizations and create something bigger.

I thought about it, and I came up with something effective. I wrote out solidituds (the official papers to ask favors) to borrow the municipality auditorium and to borrow the hospital projector. They approved, except the municipality projector because the guy wasn’t there and didn’t remember about my event (I had planed to use two projectors so they don’t overheat and burn the bulb). Anyways, I designed a small tag (which later became a bracelet) with a front representing Earth Day and the back showing a list of things they could do in their community to help out the planet locally.

Ok, now I’ll tell you what I did. I did a whole movie day, pretty much showing 7 movies every two hours starting at 8am. It was a long day. I showed the following movies:

Before they entered, I signed them up and gave them a tag with the following in front and back:

I printed out 20 pages with 8 tags on each page. I ran out of pins, so after giving them out they just started opening them and using them as bracelets.
So in total there was around 180 attendants throughout the day.