Hai Moldova! April 16th clean up day.

Today, the school that I work at, participated in a clean up that happened throughout all of Moldova. When I first heard about this event I was extremely happy. One of the first things I noticed when I arrived in Moldova was the amount of trash that litters the streets. There is also a lack of trash cans around, so if there is no place to put your trash, it just goes on the ground. Also, coming from California, where there are extreme littering fines and most people do such a good job at recycling and being green anyways, it was hard for me to get used to.



The director of the school and I

 I first heard about this clean up day at a meeting that we had in the capital about grant writing. My school director was with me and also heard about this event and I was shocked when I saw a poster hanging up at my school saying that we were going to participate in this event. Of course, I wanted to, but I thought I was going to have to ask my school director for permission to participate but she went out and signed up by herself. This made me proud.

Carolina and Valeria (my host sister)

We received around 150 sets of suits for the students to wear, which included a face mask, protective goggles, and trash bags. They ABSOLUTELY loved the suits. They thought it was so cool to be able to wear this suit that looked like something out of the movie Outbreak and took tons of pictures dressed in it.


We first did a clean up day on April 13th, which confused me since the clean up day was scheduled for April 16th. When I asked why we were doing it early, I didn't receive a clear answer. I showed up to school on wednesday, ready to teach my classes and was told that we weren't going to be having classes, we were going to do the clean up. It was raining all day long, but the students and teachers went out into the village and cleaned up a lot of trash. When I talked to my partner teacher about why she thought we did it earlier than the scheduled day, she said that they doubted the students would have showed up on a saturday to clean. If you ask me for my opinion, I think it is the teachers who didn't want to show up on a saturday.....and I am pretty sure I was correct since we then held the second clean up day today, saturday, the director of the school, one other teacher and I were the only staff there. That is one  thing I am having a hard time with here, the lack of participation from teachers for events outside of school time. I have heard teachers say that they are just too tired to show up to school for events after school and/or on weekends and that they don't get paid to be there, so why come. I am extremely grateful to that one teacher who did come out today, my school director for deciding to still participate today, and of course to all the students who DID show up on a weekend. The sun was out today, and since it has been raining off and on for the past 2 weeks, it was a perfect day to be outside.

On a side note, one thing that confused me though was this....the clean up was focused on an area in the village by a creek. I understand that trash should  not be by water and of course believe that cleaning up around the creek was needed, but I feel that other places around the village were neglected during our clean up. Students walked right past trash that littered the school campus and headed out to clean up the area by the creek. I stopped a few of them and said that there was a lot of trash on the school campus, and we should clean it up. They saw me doing this and participated for a few minutes, but then headed down to the creek. I feel that their definition of trash was large plastic/glass bottles, or other items that are big. Around the school, there were tons of ice cream wrappers, chip bags, candy wrappers and paper that they didn't seem to think needed to picked up. I also noticed some students discarding the items they were wearing when they were finished and leaving it on the ground. This made me furious. If you just spent 3 hours outside cleaning up trash, why on earth would you want to create more? I am coming to understand that this is something that they are used to and is a learned behavior and they don't really understand the concept of putting trash into a trash can, especially if there isn't one around.

This is an area that I would love to work on while I am here in Moldova. I would love to install trash cans around my village and the school and teach the students that throwing trash on the ground is not good for the environment, and it is not frumos (beautiful). I believe today's clean up was an awesome success but I would like to get a club started at school or some type of group organized where we could do monthly clean ups, or something on a regular basis. I just have to remind myself that it will take time, change doesn't come easily or overnight, but today was a step in the right direction.

*I will add pictures later