Something Awesome.

Something awesome happened Monday, and I really want to tell you about it.

But I have to tell you a few other things, first, so you can fully appreciate the awesomeness.

At the Obra (my placement site), there are various workshops for the kids.  One of these workshops is health, and it takes place on Mondays. Recently they’ve been learning about the environment, and as a part of this, they decided as a class to clean up the public plaza that’s across the street from the Obra. 

So, they went over with sticks and garbage bags and picked up the trash, but then they decided they could go even further.  One kid had the idea to collect old plastic soda bottles from the neighborhood around the Obra, fill them with colored water, and then plant them around the lamp posts.  It actually looked quite nice.

See? It's pretty.

Since this plaza is a public plaza, the rest of the neighborhood was free to benefit from this beautifying project.  Unfortunately, this also means that a few of the kids in the neighborhood were able to dig up and break these plastic bottles.  Some of the kids from the Obra found the broken bottles the next day, and with much urgency, marched them back the Obra and asked a teacher what they could do about it.  Well, the culprits were tracked down, and you know what the teachers did?

(This is where the real awesomeness starts.)

They went up to those kids and said, “Listen!  This is your plaza, too.  You’re going to join us next Monday, and we’re all going to paint that old bus stop together!”

So, on Monday, those of us from the Obra walked over to the plaza, paintbrushes and paints in hand, and met the kids who had previously uprooted the beautifying project.  Then, both groups of kids worked side by side, asked for each other’s opinions, and created this fantastic mural together.

Check out that team work!

…I guess that’s it.  It was just really, really cool- that idea of reacting to destruction with collaboration and creation.

 And I just thought you all might like to know about that.

I, for one, got really into it.