A new kind of eco-activism
The students at a school in Gori, Georgia have a disarmingly simple ambition. They want us to change the way we live. What’s more, they are showing us how. Lela Bedoshvili reports.
Indifference and ignorance
It is widely accepted that we are all living through a period when humans are having an increasingly damaging effect on the earth’s environment in so many ways. The poor use of energy in our homes, the way we dispose of chemicals, the inefficient use of water resources are just some of the problems. The list goes on. And yet we continue to tolerate the situation, which, to put it bluntly, is caused by indifference arising from the ignorance of what’s going on.
A big aim for a small group
Our school is the LEPL Vazha Pshavela Gori N9 Public School in Georgia and these were the very questions that made some of our students think very deeply and together with their teacher formed a club which they called Metamorphosis. The name is not accidental, because we long for nothing less than changing the spiritual and conscious nature of human beings – quite a big aim for a group of young students!
They knew they had to start their work at their own school.
First, club members held an open election and 2 student-rangers from each class were chosen to join the working group of the club, and quite quickly about 1,200 students and 70 teachers were considered to be members of this club. Members of the technical support team and resource officers were also pleased to work with us as well.
Research and awareness
Club members began working by conducting research about the composition of school waste: the waste left in classrooms and food waste from the school canteen. We investigated oxygen concentration in classrooms, the carbon footprint of each club member, and how global problems could be seen in own school community.
They then looked outside school and identified a chaotic range of unregulated dumping sites in the district. These sites were in fact river banks, roadside areas and so on. To start with, club members began clean-up activities around these dump-sites. They also wanted to raise awareness of the problem across the school. For this reason, the club members, together with the ‘rangers’ elected within the classes, intensively started making presentations in each class on topics like ‘Let’s Take Care of the Earth’ and the ‘Periods of Waste Decomposition’. The information obtained by processing the outcomes of the research inspired us to plan and implement activities such as making presentations in all classes for students and for parents at parent-teacher conferences. We wanted everyone to think about the threat of waste accumulating in the dumps as well as the hazards caused by the decomposition of this waste over time.
Solutions
We also wanted to be positive, so presentations increasingly referred to solutions, such as the necessity and importance of providing more wastepaper baskets. From this starting point, other students were inspired to have their own ideas and prepare and make presentations for their own friends. In order to raise public awareness, a mural was painted in an underground passageway on campus, which looked at the problem of waste decomposition. With the support of Gori City Hall, a commercial made by the club members was launched on the city TV Station under the name “Let’s Take Care of the Earth”:
Our research showed that at school, paper sheets, plastic and tins left by the students in the classrooms after the lessons were the main types of waste being generated. Therefore, we decided to place used cardboard boxes decorated by the students in every classroom to sort out recyclable waste. With the money obtained by delivering about 1,000 kg of waste paper to recycling centres, club members bought bins of different colours and started to organise different types of waste sorting. The rangers wrote appropriate inscriptions and drawings on the boxes and we started recycling tens of kilos of plastic waste as well. In this way, our whole school community became accustomed to taking care of waste sorting. Students and teachers now bring waste from their homes, students on an excursion collect plastic bottles one by one and place them in the bins located back at school.
Little Rangers
Our ‘little rangers’ – some of our younger students, together with their teachers, think carefully about waste and how it can be used in the classroom – for example by making a model of the school from recycled cardboard which was presented it at an exhibition.
Fifth-grade students were met by the chairman and members of the board of the Gori Youth Council who talked to them about ecology and waste separation. Afterwards, students invented a table game called ‘what to put where’ which helped them organise waste into different bins.
What we had set out to do was gradually happening. We were changing our way of life at school. But we wanted to do more in the community.
Recycling fabrics
Textile recycling is not easy, but the school has reached an agreement with sewing and clothes repair businesses to collect off-cut material, which is taken to the Biliki Society, an organisation which creates and protects employment for disabled workers. The ‘waste’ fabric is then used to make bags that are sold at town markets based on the agreement with the sellers. These bags were also sold at an exhibition-sale event at our school. The event was very exciting for the children as they received money earned by their own work which was then used on more recycling projects organised by Metamorphosis. By undertaking such practical work, we hope that others both in and out of school will become aware of what can be done.
Cultivating threatened tree species
We are also very concerned about endangered wildlife. Club members studied the list of endangered species included in the Red Book and selected two trees Buxus Colchitas (Kolkhetian boxwood) and a Quercus armeniace (Kolkhetian oak) to work with. They found out how to graft boxwood branches onto growing box trees and then, with the support of Gori City Hall, they planted Buxus Colchitas in two rows near the Shota Rustaveli Monument. On New Year’s Day, we launched our “Three Acorns for Happiness” campaign when we gave three acorns (beautifully wrapped using textile waste) to each employee of the school. Club members sowed their own acorns and helped others to do the same. We looked after the seedlings and when they were strong enough, we replanted them in places which would benefit from having some new trees. We also gave away a large number of oak seedlings that we had grown for other people to plant and submitted a petition for permission to plant 2 hectares of heritage oak trees in the village of Variani.
Metamorphosis – our way of life
Perhaps the most important thing about Metamorphosis is that our work is practical and not just theoretical. We are just trying to create awareness and care for the environment as part of our everyday lives while raising money for our projects and, where we can, to help disadvantaged communities. We are continually looking for opportunities to ‘spread the word’ and link up with clubs from other schools, learn from them and organise more events, including an ambitious district summer conference.
For us, this is what activism is all about.
Lela Bedoshvili teaches Maths at the LEPL Vazha Pshavela Gori No. 9 Public School in Georgia. After being pestered by her students for two years, she helped them form Metamorphosis and they haven’t looked back!
FEATURE IMAGE: Thank you to Lela and the kind permission of N9 Public School in Georgia
Support Images: With thanks to Lela, and Ave Calvar For Unsplash+
