Nicodemus Wilderness Project -- Global Registry of Apprentice Ecologists

This spring I was volunteering in a small town of Costa Rica called Esperanza (meaning "Hope" in Spanish). After my having spent several weeks in this town, Earth Day rolled around. This was a great educational opportunity for the children of the school.
Costa Rica is a country that sells itself as first world when most of the countryside still lives like the third world. One of their many problems is land use. There is very little infrastructure to bring people fresh water and funnel away pollution and trash. In addition, people are not educated about the devastating effects of deforestation on erosion.
So on Earth Day the teacher could not come in and I had the school to myself. I decided to have the students collect trash from around the town and school and put it in bags. The children with the most bags won little toys as prizes. You would not believe how much trash was collected from this 20-house town. The rest of the day was spent with planting two local trees in the school yard and learning about the environment. I taught them the difference between organic (decomposable) and inorganic trash. They helped pick out a site on the school yard for a compost pile. I explained also the cycle of water and that although their water was pure because they lived in the mountains, the people downstream suffered from the trash put in the water sources.
I hope that my students learned a lot from Earth Day, 2008, and that they took the information home to their families. I loved seeing their enthusiasm and pride as they beautified their community. They should feel good about themselves for making the world a better place.