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| The playground before |
While we were teaching at Los Llenos the past two days, we noticed that the area they use as the playground is quite run down and unsafe. There are nails, pieces of metal, and wood just lying around and they kids just lean a board up against the fence, climb up, and use it as a slide. It is incredibly resourceful, but it makes us quite nervous since we are used to so many more rules and so much more supervision in the USA. We asked the principal if he would mind us cleaning the playground up a bit and he was thrilled that we were willing to take on the project!
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| Working on removing all kinds of dangerous things-- including a kitchen sink! |
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| The new (safer) obstacles |
Today we loaded up the van with shovels, work gloves, a hammer, screwdrivers, and some plants and were off to Los Llenos for some playground beautification. First we cleared out the large rocks and boards that would be tripping hazards, then a few girls got to work clearing out all the random metal and wood in the field. Jenny, Holly, and I worked on weeding the three flower beds at the school. It was a little tricky to distinguish between Costa Rican plants and weeds, but we did the best we could given the limited gardening knowledge and one glove each that we had. We learned to be resourceful like the students we had been working with, and since the girls clearing the field were using the shovels, we used some makeshift boards as our own gardening shovels. By the time the kids came out for recess, we had cleared out at least three cans of trash, recycling, and organic materials, stacked all the boards and dangerous metal pieces behind the school, cleaned up the gardens, planted some new plants, and created a little obstacle course for the kids. They all seemed super excited with the improvements and ran around the obstacle course as fast as they could!
Today we loaded up the van with shovels, work gloves, a hammer, screwdrivers, and some plants and were off to Los Llenos for some playground beautification. First we cleared out the large rocks and boards that would be tripping hazards, then a few girls got to work clearing out all the random metal and wood in the field. Jenny, Holly, and I worked on weeding the three flower beds at the school. It was a little tricky to distinguish between Costa Rican plants and weeds, but we did the best we could given the limited gardening knowledge and one glove each that we had. We learned to be resourceful like the students we had been working with, and since the girls clearing the field were using the shovels, we used some makeshift boards as our own gardening shovels. By the time the kids came out for recess, we had cleared out at least three cans of trash, recycling, and organic materials, stacked all the boards and dangerous metal pieces behind the school, cleaned up the gardens, planted some new plants, and created a little obstacle course for the kids. They all seemed super excited with the improvements and ran around the obstacle course as fast as they could!
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