International Coastal Cleanup

The International Coastal Cleanup was this past Saturday (September 27th). Actually, it was supposed to be the Saturday before (September 20th), but it was raining and if you know one thing about St. Vincent's culture, know that Vincentians run toward fire but run away from rain. So obviously, the event was cancelled and moved to the next Saturday. Which was 3 days ago. There was supposed to be a river clean-up in Mespo (Mespo is a part of Marriaqua, which means "married rivers," so we have a lot of them), but since we didn't have enough people (just me and 2 Ministry employees, who planned the event and HAD to show up), we drove to the coast and cleaned up the mouth of the Yambou River, which REALLY needed it! We spent 3 hours cleaning up the equivalent of about 1/8 mile of beach front. We had to record everything we picked up for the ICC records, so I worked with 1 other man and together we filled 5 garbage bags (industrial size). Which was quite a lot. In the end, we collected over 150 plastic bottles, hundreds of food containers, thousands of little plastic pieces and 2 tires. A nice effort. We also found a surprising number of boat parts, which either stopped working and got tossed overboard OR (my favorite hypothesis) were shattered into a thousand little pieces by a Jaws-ish shark. Duh-dun, duh-dun, duh-dun.
Anyway, the beach cleanup was pretty successful, even though only 8 people showed up: 6 Ministry employees, 1 child of a Ministry employee and me. We managed to collect about 20 bags FULL of garbage, which made a big dent in our small beach site. I know that next week, the beach will probably be filled again with garbage, but I hope that the people who watched us spend our Saturday picking up other people's trash will think twice the next time they go to toss their soda bottle on the ground.
In other news, we are officially more than halfway through our service! We have less than three weeks to go, and we are all excited about starting our projects and a little anxious about being on our own. We had our Mid-Training-Interviews on Friday and everyone is doing well so far. We're pretty excited that our group is still intact at this point! No one has left on any of the Eastern Caribbean islands, which is virtually unheard of at this point. Either we are really a spectacular group or just a little slow to react...I'm pulling for the former. We've reached the point in our training where each of us must implement a program-specific project (i.e. a youth development project or an NGO project). Mine is in the works, and I'll tell you all about it later on. I'm really excited about it, though - I hope everything falls (or rather, is pushed really, really hard) into place.