Summer Service Reflection _ Grace Herman

August 12th, 2019

This last Friday us at Terraza in partnership with the nonprofit, Costa Rica Makes Me Happy (CRMMH) we hosted a beach clean up. CRMMH’s mission is to keep Costa Rica clean and lower plastic pollution. They want to lower plastic usage at the forefront and dispose of plastic waste the proper way and implement sustainable recycling.

When Catalina and I got to the beach on Friday morning, the founder of CRMMH explained how they are partnering with a program that has a machine that turns plastic waste into bricks. Different from eco bricks I believe that they are turning plastic into a concrete like material. In total there were 8 of us and we pick up around three bags of trash. Tamarindo is a generally clean beach so there was not a ton to pick up. When cleaning the beach each set of partners set a bucket and a trash bag. We put all the plastic we found in the bucket and everything else into the bag. Later we compiled all the plastic each group had and now CRMMH is taking it to the program to get it turned into bricks. CRMMH is just starting off and they don’t have a ton of local following so they wanted to partner with us to get the word out there. CRMMH wanted our help getting recognized and getting teenagers involved, which is exciting. It means we are doing something right and things are going up, that Terraza is growing and people have noticed. I admit there were not very many people there but like I said, we are growing.

At the moment when the Terraza team meets we are mostly focusing on how we can serve the community. We want to show the community that we are involved and inspire them to get involved in Terraza. We are trying to create a loop. On Tuesday the 6th we had a meeting with a woman who is running a kids center in Santa Rosa. We talked about how we can connect the two projects and help one another. We want Terraza to be the next step after the kids center. We also want the community of teenagers at Terraza to help out and give time to the center in Santa Rosa. Also it could be a way to connect with other CAS projects. For example, Sydney and Mayla could paint a mural there, Anya could help get school supplies for the kids, Alexa’s project could connect with a program they have there for teenage girls and women, etc.

This summer service and community have been a huge part of my CAS experience. It makes up one of the three goals we have at Terraza and it has been key over the course of the last two months. We had a team come down from Uruguay who we watched do service projects and who helped us out on a lot of events. Our team learn a lot from them and since service has really been on our mind. But we are struggling to figure out how to get teenagers to serve/help out in their community without a reward.

In conclusion this summer I have learned a lot about what serving means, how you can do it, what goes into planning a service project, and how important serving is. Lastly but most importantly, I have learned that it is difficult to get people interested in a service project. This was evident during our big fundraiser, our small beach clean up and even within our service team.

Thanks for reading,

Grace

*Challenges were undertaken showing that new skills are learned, Plan and initiate an activity, Show perseverance and commitment to your project, Work collaboratively with others, Engage with issues of global importance.