This October, Conscious Impact held 6 sessions of our inaugural school holiday program, “Chutti Macai Bhutti”. Chutti Macai Bhutti is a Nepali phrase meaning, ‘we’re on break; let’s make popcorn!’. Schools in Nepal are closed for about one month during the festival times of Dashain and Tihar, the two largest and most celebrated festivals of the year. During that time, we invited children of ages 4-15 to a holiday youth program at our camp. We had more than 60 children attend our program!
Local youth use bottle bricks to build a new table and bench. Photo by Ankit Tanu
Building upon our bottle brick program from last year, we chose the holiday theme to be waste management and natural building. As Nepal does not have a nation-wide waste management system, trash is often left on the side of the road or burned in and around the home. Our goal is to raise awareness of the dangers of burning plastic trash and alternatives to throwing trash on the ground through the youth of the Takure community.
Our Youth Empowerment team explains the importance of collecting trash in the community and how we can use bottle bricks to build sustainable structures. Photo by Ankit Tanu
What are bottle bricks and why are they important?
Bottle bricks are a great way to deal with plastic trash in areas where there are not proper waste management systems. Bottle bricks are created by tightly stuffing plastic bottles with small pieces of plastic trash. When the bottles are stuffed properly, they are incompressible and can be used as material in building projects. We have used bottle bricks in the creation of interior walls for our toilets and the benches around our bakery area. In March of 2019, we began offering a recycling program to the local community. We offered to pay youth for properly stuffed bottle bricks, paying from 5-20 Nepali rupees (0.05-0.20 US dollars) depending on the size of the bottle. In two months, we collected 194 bottles from the children of the local community. It turned into a family affair with many children telling us the trash was collected and stuffed by their parents and grandparents. We have resumed the bottle brick program and have already collected dozens more.
Children stomp in the cob (a mixture of sand, clay and straw) during the holiday youth program. Photo by Ankit Tanu
During the Chutti Macai Bhutti program, we chose to focus on a building project with the students where they would be able to build with the bottle bricks many of them had collected and stuffed. We used the bottle bricks along with cob to improve our oven and baking area. Cob is a mixture of local clay soil, sand, water, and straw. It’s a natural building material we use in and around our camp. The most fun part of cob is that you get to mix it with your feet, and no matter your age the feeling of squishing mud in between your toes is magical.
Bottle brick bowling! Photo by Jonathan H. Lee
A school holiday program can’t be all work, so we divided each session into two blocks of activities. We spent half of each session working on the baking area with cob and bottle bricks and the other half of the sessions were games, games, and more games! We played a mixture of games from Nepal and abroad, all incorporating our theme of waste management.. Having a community of volunteers from around the world gives us the unique opportunity to share games of various origin. After group discussions about the various types of trash we had trash sorting relays and bottle stuffing relays. A huge hit with the kids was bottle brick bowling!
A local student and participant in our Chutti Macai Bhutti holiday program, makes her own pizza for the first time in her life. Photo by Jonathan H. Lee
We ended our two-week program with a baking extravaganza in our newly remodeled oven area. We baked chocolate chip cookies and made PIZZA! The children helped prepare the cookie dough, chop veggies for pizza toppings, and then each had the opportunity to help assemble and create a pizza. There was lots of dancing and laughing along with bellies full of pizza and a cookie to top it all off. It was a wonderful ending to a successful program.
To learn more about our Youth Program, donate to support this project, or sign up to volunteer with us next year, visit www.consciousimpact.org.
A little fun and games with the kids :) Photo by Ankit Tanu