A civil action (sort of)
(sorry about this - I still don't understand how to get blogger.com to allow me to move around pictures. Help, anyone? I can only put the pictures at the end or the beginning - not frumos!)
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"what you put in the ground... that is what will grow."
This was the slogan of our Youth Council's recent anti-litter demonstration. We spent an afternoon cleaning our central park, and then took all the trash we collected (from ice cream wrappers and beer bottles, to cans of tuna and socks) and tied it together with strings. The next morning, Sunday, piata day (which means many people walk through the center of our town), we hung the strings of trash in a tree on the main road in our village. So it looked as if the tree was growing trash, instead of fruit. And we put a sign next to the tree with our witty slogan.
We then spent 5 hours standing next to the tree, defending the tree, defending our positions on littering, talking to people, and in general, having a good time. It was really interesting for me to see both the reactions of the people who passed us - most common: "what is it new year's? (this is when Moldovans decorate trees, not for Christmas), "what is this craziness?", "why did you kids get our streets so dirty" and "are you selling bottles?". As well as the responses of my kids in defense of what they were doing: "no this isn't craziness, this is reality", or "there is so much trash on the ground I'm surprised trees like this don't already exist."
When people would walk by without really looking, and just talk down to us - the kids would respond by asking them to read the plaque, and asking them if they agreed or disagreed. Very rationally, I am proud of them. Of course, there were some crazies who yelled at us, and children who wanted to "pick" the garbage from the tree -- and the people who did drive by in cars slowed so much that we were afraid they would cause an accident -- but overall I think it was a huge success.
Littering is a huge problem in Moldova - and is usually one of the first things new volunteers observe about Moldova, unfortunately. It is such a pretty country, but the communal land, is not taken care of. Moldovans know it is a problem as well. So we needed to do something different, to bring attention to a problem that everyone knows exists, and has just accepted that exists.
The idea from this came from something HEAG (Hamilton Environmental Action Group) or something like that, did at Hamilton while I was a student there. Instead of putting one day's trash in the dump, they put it in the middle of the walkway at our college. So we had to walk around it, had to notice it. That really affected me in a way that anti-littering campaigns that were in your face and aggressive didn't - it was fact of the matter, and hard to ignore. Since we don't really have the luxury of sidewalks here, and since Moldova is an agriculture society, I morphed the idea into the "what you plant, that is what will grow" idea.
And I think it worked fabulously. While you, in America, might be used to these weird ways that campaigns, magazines, advertisers and NGOs get your attention, this kind of round-about way of reaching people is new to Moldova. It definitely got a reaction, we are waiting to see if it gets any results (many people gave the excuse that they litter because there aren't trash cans -- true fact that there aren't). One older lady started yelling at us in Russian that we waited too long to do this trash tree - the problem was too big now-- and then yelled at passing youth that they better heed our warnings, or they would be eating trash - but that the state of the planet didn't matter for her, becuase she was soon going to die. Another girl made a snide remark about us making a "beautiful" tree in the middle of the town - her boyfriend corrected her by saying that we didn't throw the stuff on the ground in the first place, we just collected it. Nice.
If anything, we got people talking, and noticing. And that is what you want, and really, all you can ask for.
This entry was posted
on Monday, July 14, 2008 at 3:12 PM.
