Jonathan Maizbide
The community service that I chose to participate in is called Project Bottles Up, which is a community service program within the New York City high school, City College Academy of the Arts (CCAA). This community service program have collaboration with Hug It Forward with the opportunity to raise donations and awareness to be able to build bottle schools in Guatemala. Hug It Forward is a non-profit organization that brings education and awareness to village in Guatemala by building bottle schools. The plastic bottles collected by participants of Project Bottles Up are used to built bottle schools (stuffed with trash), cement, tin and other materials. The cost of building schools in Guatemala is about $13,000 to $19,000 dollars and with the help of Hug It Forward, there are more than 65 schools built in Guatemala.
A group of Project Bottles Up members was visiting certain cities of New York and New Jersey on April 28th with the purpose of finding different places where they could get college and high school students, and I had the opportunity to participate on April 30th in the city of Newark. All volunteers were supposed to find as many bottles as possible within a time of 3 hours, and the person in charge assigned 5 groups of 3 students in different locations to find plastic bottles of any kind. With my team mates Jack (Rutgers University's student) and Mostafa (Montclair State University's student), we decided to collect plastic bottles of specific brands in Branch Brook Park, in this case, Jack and I decided to get Poland Spring bottles since that park has 4 fields of baseball, 1 field of Soccer/Football and a huge lake, where many people drink water and throw the bottles either in wastebaskets or floor. Mostafa agreed to get plastic bottles of juice, soda, alcohol and others. We basically divided the Branch Brook Park in 3 parts where we found plastic bottles, and I chose the part of the lake in which I was able to find 148 plastic bottles. Jack chose the 4 fields of baseball in which he got 152 and Mostafa chose the Soccer/Football field in which he got 98 bottles.
After Jack, Mostafa and I reunited and counted how many bottles we were able to get, there was a truck of the community service program that picked us up in the park to take us to the main place of this program. The total amount of plastic bottles that 15 students were able to get was 1645 bottles, and the director or person in charge and all of us were so amazed that we were able to get some many bottles around 3 hours. After that, the director started explaining us how this was going to work and help for the construction of many more schools in Guatemala.
Looking at this community service program in a sustainable way, it is to make understand the world that restoring and re-using materials can be useful in many different ways that can prevent to throw away the use of good materials.
A group of Project Bottles Up members was visiting certain cities of New York and New Jersey on April 28th with the purpose of finding different places where they could get college and high school students, and I had the opportunity to participate on April 30th in the city of Newark. All volunteers were supposed to find as many bottles as possible within a time of 3 hours, and the person in charge assigned 5 groups of 3 students in different locations to find plastic bottles of any kind. With my team mates Jack (Rutgers University's student) and Mostafa (Montclair State University's student), we decided to collect plastic bottles of specific brands in Branch Brook Park, in this case, Jack and I decided to get Poland Spring bottles since that park has 4 fields of baseball, 1 field of Soccer/Football and a huge lake, where many people drink water and throw the bottles either in wastebaskets or floor. Mostafa agreed to get plastic bottles of juice, soda, alcohol and others. We basically divided the Branch Brook Park in 3 parts where we found plastic bottles, and I chose the part of the lake in which I was able to find 148 plastic bottles. Jack chose the 4 fields of baseball in which he got 152 and Mostafa chose the Soccer/Football field in which he got 98 bottles.
After Jack, Mostafa and I reunited and counted how many bottles we were able to get, there was a truck of the community service program that picked us up in the park to take us to the main place of this program. The total amount of plastic bottles that 15 students were able to get was 1645 bottles, and the director or person in charge and all of us were so amazed that we were able to get some many bottles around 3 hours. After that, the director started explaining us how this was going to work and help for the construction of many more schools in Guatemala.
Looking at this community service program in a sustainable way, it is to make understand the world that restoring and re-using materials can be useful in many different ways that can prevent to throw away the use of good materials.
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