Random thoughts on beach cleanup

Every month, we help to run a Community Beach Cleanup. I say "help" because although our NGO Robertsport Community Works organizes it, we're opening up leadership of the Saturday event to the wider community: local surfers, expatriate surfers, weekend beachgoers -- pretty much anyone who wants to volunteer.

Only here's the thing. After 30+ members of the community come together under the hot sun and walk down the beach picking up plastic with each other, here's what actually happens. We pile the rice bags, bulging with marine debris and local plastic waste, into the bag of the Nana's Lodge pick-up truck and it drives away.

Here's the thing. We take it to the local dump and...we dump it. We're picking up trash in one place and putting it someplace else. True, it's better in a dump than washing around the ocean, suffocating sea turtles who think plastic bags are jellyfish and clogging up fish gills. And to our credit, we separate the plastic marine debris from the other garbage.

It's that separation that, in a few months, just might pay off. I heard the World Bank is starting to fund a plastic recycling program. I'm not sure of the details, but it sounds like Chinese companies might be buying plastic waste to recycle. Our plastic would be almost perfect: sorted, clean and dry.

A big thank you to Nana's, who also pay for the meal our volunteers then enjoy -- usually a spicy mix of cassava leaf and dried fish served with rice in giant pots. Really, they're as wide as my sink -- I'll photograph the women cooking sometime.

Paperwork Accomplished!

This is to certify that Robertsport Community Works is now an officially registered NGO with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Department of Planning in Liberia. Getting through this process is neither easy nor transparent. We are tremendously grateful to Alfred Brownell and his team at the Green Advocates for rising to meet this challenge. In the midst of an exceptionally busy schedule and in between bouts of fighting to hold Liberia's extractive industries to the highest global standards, Alfred and his team followed our documents around the ministry, week after week, month after month until the job was done.

Now that we've registered, we can move forward with several applications for support and funding along with our research and plans for setting up a precedent setting conservation easement on the land in Robertsport.

October 2009 budget update

Here's a summary of our October 2009 income and expenditures by project:

Organizational
Expenditure
Filing our Articles of Incorporation at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs $75.00

Sub-total -$75.00

Robertsport Community Campsite
Income
Camping fees $25

Expenditure
Hammocks (2) $20.00
Benches around the almond trees $25

Sub-total -$20

Women's Sewing Cooperative
Income
23 beach bags $11.50

Expenditure
Beach bag tags $3

Sub-total $8.50

Surf Liberia Scholarship fundraising
17 shirts sold $68.00

Project summary
Organizational: -$75.00
Robertsport Community Campsite -$20
Women's Sewing Cooperative $11.50
September 2009 Community Fund -$627.50
Surf Liberia Scholarship fundraising $68.00

Community Fund as of October 2009: -$711.00
Surf Liberia Scholarship money raised in October: $68.00

Photos of the Women's Sewing Cooperative

My friend Jana Videira took some great photos of the Women's Sewing Coop when she came to visit us in Robertsport. I'm using the occasion to introduce you to a few of the women in the group. Thank you, Jana!
Bendu is one of the Team Leaders. She is the most serious of our members and the most matronly, regularly appealing to her authority as the eldest woman in the Coop to boss other members around. She was our first project manager. As Team Leader, she's responsible for quality control and cloth cutting. Before each meeting, she measures each finished bag and collects them from the women in her team, just like she's doing in the photo above.

Early on, I bought Bendu a phone, she we never used it, referring to all sorts of SIM card problems and issues with the machine. After repeated attempts to reach her over a series of months (not weeks), I finally took it back and kept it in a drawer. My own phone was stolen last week, so I had the occasion to use it, and it works just fine.

This is Teresa, who joined the Coop after being talked up by Bendu as a talented seamstress of African fashions. "She know how to sew," Bendu would nod at me emphatically. Teresa is older and chill, like Bendu. She has a real eye for quality sewing and is responsible for teaching everyone the thick hem stitching on the beach bags -- an innovation that improved quality.

This is one of my favorite photos and the only one not taking facing the beach. The grove of trees we've cleared looks more like a forest, and Teresa looks relaxed and right at home.
This is Botoe, modelling the Fish Bone and Bunnies beach bag prints. Your can see her making the Bunnies bag with her daughter in the one above.

The first photo was taken by the inlet at Inner Cotton Trees, which is always shifting with the tide. Botoe is one of the most beautiful women in the sewing Coop and was one of the first to want to model them with Jana. At the time of the photo shoot, Botoe had two children. She lost her little boy a few weeks ago, a sadness which I'll write more about it a little bit.
Mariama is the granddaughter of the Community Chief. She's small and looks quiet: she never even spoke our first couple of meetings. We pass Mariama's house on the way to the Community Campsite in Robertsport every week and I usually see her, pounding cassava for fufu or doing something in the house. She has a really cute daughter who comes to all of our meetings. Mariama also helps cook lunch -- usually cassava leaf and dried fish -- for the community volunteers after the monthly beach cleanups.

We first started doing real quality control during one endlessly rainy weekend, when we held our meeting in the restaurant/bar area at Nana's Lodge next door to the Campsite. It rained the whole time. I recruited Nate to come and help me measure each bag and hold its seams up to the light. When it was her turn, Mariama found it excruciating. "My bag is fine. It will pass!" she shouted at Nate, laughing and nervous. "Mariama! I thought you were shy!" I teased her, and all of the women shook their heads, laughing.

This is Jebbeh. She was one of the young women in the kitchen with me the week I ran the Robertsport Cooking School out of Nana's Lodge. She looks rather striking in this picture, and doesn't usually make such an open expression. She'll like this photo when we print it out for her.
Tina is the other Team Leader. She was the smartest person I trained in the Nana's Kitchen when we ran the cooking school. She still makes me fresh lime juice over the weekends and prepares Nate and I our dinner plates and brings them to our table. Tina is the best.
This is Matilda. She works at Nana's Lodge and will be our third Team Leader as the Coop expands in the future. She's showing off a bag in Taxi lapa, one of our more popular patterns in the beginning. Matilda sewed all the bags for them, so we call this "her lapa."

Stay tuned as we keep growing and thanks to all of you who have supported our products!

Running the Robertsport Community Campsite

Photo courtesy of Jana Videira.

For the last five months, Nate and I have driven to Robertsport every weekend, set up our campsite, hired local security, brought out hammocks and kerosene lanterns, made sure the toilet thatch was defending modesty, and readied Robertsport Community Campsite for potential guests. We stayed there the whole weekend, so it was also an investment in our own comfort, but gradually the packing and unpacking of extra tents and the scent of kerosene in the trunk made us start thinking. We definitely needed someone to run the campsite.

Over the same five months, we've seen local surfer (and world famous!) Alfred Lomax smile and snap to attention whenever he's heard of a new guest visiting Robertsport. We've seen him introduce himself politely, ask tons of questions, invite strangers to stay at his house, organize his mother or his fiancee to cook for them, give them surf lessons, entrust them with his surf boards, and generally encourage visitors to feel welcome, safe and appreciated. Clearly, it was an obvious choice.

Last weekend we sat down with Alfred in a grove of hammocks and offered him the job. He was thrilled, especially since we hired his best friend and fellow surfer Benjamin McCrumuda, to be the groundskeeper. Ben has been making 'African benches' for a few weeks now -- uncomfortable looking wooden benches made from tree trunks and bamboo poles that are actually quite nice to sit on, in a therapeutic sort of way -- so we were really just formalizing his position. Plus, it's good to support them two of them: they do everything together and are respected young members of the community.

We've trained Alfred on how to make receipts and now he's officially in charge. We had a Peace Corps guest last week and a couple of friends stay over the weekend. Things are going well.