All about beach cleanup

We're well on our way with three major projects now and have been working officially with the Robertsport Community for six months. Over the next couple of weeks, I want to share each of these projects with you in-depth--how we started them, how we mobilize support for them and how we keep them going. If someone wants to do something similar, maybe they'll get some ideas. If anyone wants more details, let me know.

So, beach cleanup. The idea for this started on Nate and my first weekend in Robertsport in May 2009, right after we moved. We'd both visited before to do a recce, but hadn't really noticed the trash. That weekend, there were single-use plastic bags and marine debris all over the beach. That, and a 3-meter pit where someone had sand mined illegally and dug right under our neighbor's cotton tree, so deep that the roots were showing. Here we are with Trinity Dental Clinic dentist Keith Chapman after picking up the trash people were throwing in it. (Photo courtesy of Adam Weiner.)
All good projects need partners, so the first thing we did was see if Musa, the owner of next door Nana's Lodge, would be interested in partnering with us. Lucky for us, he was--and Nana's Lodge remains the lead partner of the Community Beach Cleanup. Every month, they pay for volunteers to share a meal together at the campsite. Then, they load our rice bags filled with plastic into their pickup and take it to the town dump. A big thank-you to Nana's Lodge for supporting this project.

Here's a photo (courtesy of Myles Estey) of our first cleanup, when we picked up almost 500 pounds of trash.
Since then, we've come a long way. We've handed over the project entirely to local leadership, which is sustainable and very exciting. First, we had the local surfers running it. That went well, but then local leader Abraham (aka A.B.) Fanbulleh came forward and really wanted to volunteer, so he's the project leader now. Here are the surfers with surfer and photographer Sean Brody, who took the rest of the photos below during our September clean-up.

We've had numerous people tell A.B. that they'd like to be paid for their work, and each time he brings this up (he brings this up a lot) we remind him that volunteering is...volunteering. And we reward participation with a small meal, cooked by Miriama and her friends. And if you participate for five months, you get a blue Clean the Beach shirt. And if you participate for 10 months, which will take us into the rainy season, you get a RCW raincoat (these will be stylin'). And, we tell him, we recruit for all of our microenterprise projects from the group of volunteers. I expect he'll keep bringing it up, though.

Over the six month beach cleanup has been running, we've had things become a little more informal--now on the first Saturday morning of each month, you just show up with your friends, grab gloves and a rice bag, and walk towards Locos. You come back to eat when your bag is pretty much filled or you score big, like a car bumper we'll be carrying back that washed up right at the Locos point. A.B. writes you name down as you eat, you hand your gloves bag, we count the bags and carry them to Nana's, where they load them with the weekend's garbage and take them to the dump. They bring the rice bags back and we use them again the next month.

Of course, where the trash goes is another story (hint: it's not great) and the focus of a future recycling project. Wonderfully, it's the community who pointed out that something needs to be done with the plastic in the landfill--and the community who notice now when day-trippers leave plastic plates and soda cans all over the beach. They don't just notice--they take a wheelbarrow and pick it up.

Now, it looks like the Monrovia-based surfer we sponsor, Peter Swen, is going to organize his own neighborhood cleanup at ELWA. We're lending him rice bags and gloves and helping him raise money to provide a thank-you meal for the volunteers. (Nice one, Peter.)

Thanks again to Musa at Nana's Lodge, to our anonymous donors who paid for gloves and rice bags and to all our volunteers.

Robertsport Community Works announces a partnership with Soul Surfers Foundation

Robertsport Community Works is proud to announce a partnership with Soul Surfers Foundation, a Dutch non-profit that supports surfing-oriented development and humanitarian work. We've been selected as their featured project for 2010 and will be working closely with them to develop projects that support conservation, water safety and help promote local surfing in Robertsport. They're also coming to visit us in February, which I look forward to writing about.

In 2009, Soul Surfers gave us a grant of 1000 euros to support our nascent water safety program, bolster Surf Liberia's efforts to mentor and support local surfers, and to help make our monthly Community Beach Cleanup sustainable. We're in the process of receiving this money and will be sharing with you how we intend to put it to good use.

Thank you, Soul Surfers!

November 2009 project and budget update

To all you faithful followers of these updates, we've changed a few things that you might find interesting. I've explained them for each of the applicable projects. Also, it looks like we might have some grant money coming in over the next few months. We'll update you on this very exciting news!

Robertsport Community Campsite
We've seen enough sustained income from the campsite that we wanted to reward the work that local surfers Alfred Lomax and Benjamin McCrumuda have been contributing the project.

Alfred Lomax is now the official Manager, responsible for setting up hammocks, tents and lanterns, keeping the pit latrine freshly ashed (to keep the smell and bugs down), welcoming guests and collecting campsite fees. Those of you who know Alfred personally know that he's a hospitality natural, and it will be no surprise that he's doing an excellent job. Alfred gets a $2 commission from each $5 camping fee, so that's why the numbers might look a little different this month.

Benjamin McCrumada is the campsite's Groundskeeper, responsible for building small benches, upkeep on the thatch around the latrine and shower area, and keeping paths and the parking lot brushed of bush grasses. He's paid a monthly salary of $15 for this--about the equivalent of the piecemeal work he was getting to do the same jobs, but now a steady a reliable source of income for him and his family.

Thanks to the magnanimous generosity of RCW Board Member Magnus Wolfe Murray, we've been renting his small ($10/night) and large ($15/night) tents to help raise funds for the campsite and the Community Fund, which provides the seed money for our microenterprise projects. As you'll see, now that it's dry season and thanks to the Nana's Lodge Sports Festival and Family Fun Weekend, we've had a good month.

Expenditures
Ben's salary: $15
Paying security one weekend because management didn't collect fees from the campers (it won't happen again): $60

Income
Campsite fees: $72
Tent rental: $75

Sub-total: $72

Community Beach Cleanup
Expenditure
New gloves for community members (30 pair): -$40
Sub-total: -$40

Women's Sewing Cooperative and The African T-Shirt Company
The Women's Sewing Cooperative did a good business going into the Christmas season, selling bags online through The African T-Shirt Company and at the US Embassy's Christmas Craft Fair. To make sure we had enough in stock, we expanded the Coop to 12 young women, diversified our product line to include yoga mat bags ($15) and hand bags ($10), and made some strategic scaleup and management decisions I'll blog about later. Based on good feedback from the bags, we've raised the price of the beach bags to $15. Because of the increased revenue and the new setup, we raised the amount of income coming in from 5% of profits to 10% -- an investment that will help make the project more sustainable. More about this in a future blog.

Income from Women's Sewing Coop bag sales: $48
Entry fee to sell Coop products at the Craft Fair: -$10
Transport and $10/day stipend for Bendu to come to Monrovia and sell at the Craft Fair: -$30

Our fundraising arm, The African T-Shirt Company, sells t-shirts--most of which we design ourselves, some of which we sell for friends. Three of our t-shirts fundraise directly to project areas:

Surf Liberia: These profits from these shirts goes to the Surf Liberia Scholarship Fund. In addition to paying half the school fees for our sponsored local surfers (they earn the other half by working on or running microenterprise projects), we also mentor them personally and professionally, helping them create short-term and long-term goals both for their surfing and their larger futures.

We held the 1st Annual Surf Liberia Contest this month and gave away
Income for Surf Liberia project from shirt sales and surf contest: $189
Expenditure for Surf Liberia t-shirts for local surfers in the contest: -$48
Travel and $10/day stipend for Solomon to sell Surf Liberia contest shirts in Robertsport that weekend: -$35


Cotton Tree: The tree that wraps around the front and side of this shirt is the ancient cotton tree on the Robertsport Community Campsite -- the historic tree that the boat carrying first President of Liberia Joseph Jenkins Roberts to Liberia was tied to. All profits from this shirt support our environmental programs--projects like beach cleanup and the community eco-walks in the surrounding rainforest.
Income for conservation projects: $45


African Women = Power: These shirts fundraise for gender-based violence programs in Liberia run by the American Refugee Comittee. All profits go to safehouses across the country where women and girl survivors of rape receive medical, legal, justice and psychological services. More on this in a future post.
Income for the ARC's safehouses for women and girl survivors: $36

Sub-total: $169 + $36 for the ARC


Project Summary
Robertsport Community Campsite: $72
Community Beach Cleanup: -$40
Women's Sewing Coop and African T-Shirt Company: $169
Total: $201

Budget Summary
Community Fund as of October 2009: -$711
Community Fund as of November 2009: -$510

Thanks to everyone for your support, suggestions and for helping us make this work.

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.

October Beach Cleanup

We moved our beach cleaning forward by one week at the request of the On Surfari team, who wanted to document the event. Since neither the human race nor the ocean are running out of garbage, the beaches had already accumulated enough fresh trash to overpower and exhaust approximately thirty volunteers from the community.

I missed the first cleanup; but from what Elie says, there were fewer large pieces of plastic waste this time around, which may have contributed to the lower number of rice bags full of trash that we collectively gathered. Many people returned to help us for the second time in a row, including the traditional chief of the Uptown village and the RCW sponsored surfers (pictured below in a state of empty-wave induced distraction). The expatriate surf scene was also much better represented this time around.


The bag I am holding below probably weighs fifty or sixty pounds. In the three weeks between the last cleanup and the one depicted here, well over fifteen bags of this garbage washed up on a stretch of beach that is less than a kilometer long. If we had been patient enough to pick through all the shredded, soft plastic that results from the pinches of oil, kerosene, salt, and everything else that are sold to inhabitants of the poverty line for a few pennies, we could have filled another fifteen--and if we rounded the corner towards town and the armada of fishing boats, I can't imagine how many other bags we would have filled.

Even the day after the cleanup, a bag or more worth of new large filth was on our small stretch of stewarded beach. Thinking about those giant swirling masses of ocean waste is super depressing. How many bags would that be and then where would we put them?


Thanks to everyone for their help, support and participation! All photographs courtesy of Sean Brody.

The 1st Robertsport Community Beach Cleanup

Photos courtesy of Myles Estey.

On Saturday, 12 September, about 30 community members and expatriates met under the cotton tree at the Robertsport Community Campsite to participate in the first Robertsport Community Beach Cleanup. September's cleanup was part of the Ocean Conservancy's 24th International Coastal Cleanup -- the largest volunteer event in the world with over 400,000 volunteers in over 100 countries. The event raises awareness about the importance of clean beaches, oceans and waterways to human and environmental health.

Our goal was to collect plastic and marine debris from Fisherman's Point to Shipwrecks -- the main stretch of tourist and surfing beach. We gathered around 9 AM and by 10 AM had divided into teams lead by community members and RCW-sponsored surfers Alfred Lomax and Benjamin McCrumuda.
Each volunteer had a pair of thick leather work gloves and a rice bag to collect the trash, but the bags soon filled up and people began dumping the trash into a large pile at the campsite so that they could reuse their bags. This created a logistical challenge at the end, because we needed the trash in back in the rice bags to transport it to the dump, but it did create an impressive looking pile of plastic. We're scaling up our supplies for next month's cleanup and expect more volunteers as well.
We collected 28 rice bags in less than 2 hours -- over 500 pounds of trash. There were a large number of single-use plastic bags that, judging by the newish looking state they washed up in, are from around the Robertsport area. There was also a sizeable amount of older plastics that had broken and decomposed in the water. With the help of a marine biologist who is kindly guiding us, we're collecting data on the types and amount of marine debris collected -- data that will help us form intervention programs to reduce, reuse and recycle local waste in the future.

Every second Saturday around 10:00 am we'll be leading similar cleanups, so please join us or show your support by buying a $10 Cotton Tree t-shirt -- all the proceeds go to our environmental projects. Email me to get involved or pick up a shirt!