Why build a bottle school?

From Bottle School Wiki

Contents 1 Wins for the Environment 1.1 Trash out of the Streets 1.2 Trash out of the Air 1.3 Trash out of the Water 1.4 Trash out of the Land 1.5 Helping Animals Avoid Trash 2 Wins for the Kids 2.1 Educational opportunity 2.2 Girls especially benefit 2.3 Pulling communities out of poverty 2.4 Environmental Education 2.5 Empowering youth 3 Wins for the Community 3.1 Enabling Community Leadership 3.2 Everyone contributes manual labor 3.3 Child Participation 3.4 Pride and Ownership 3.5 Empowerment 3.6 Solidarity 3.7 Boost to local economy 3.8 Sustained Change 4 Wins for the Volunteers 4.1 Local volunteering 4.2 Foreign Volunteering 5 Wins for the Donors 5.1 Addressing many different needs with one donation 5.2 The chance to participate side-by-side as one people 5.3 Value for money

Using plastic bottles to build schools addresses different problems with one project. The effects are so wide-ranging and stretch across different fields: it’s really quite amazing!

Bottle schools create win-win solutions through and through: empowering communities to come together, putting factions aside and instilling an educational future for their communities, their children and their children’s children; bringing environmental consciousness to rural villages to provide solutions for their trash management problems; kids in the villages having a sense of ownership in the construction of the schools by stuffing bottles, cleaning their villages and using trash for benefit rather than it becoming an overwhelming eyesore and health risk.

At the same time, building bottle schools brings awareness to the impact that donors in developed countries can make in poorer countries, as well as the awareness of giving and serving others. Additionally, the Hug it Forward movement is providing and demonstrating the life-changing experience of serving others in tangible and intangible ways.

On the following pages, we describe in more detail some of the wins for the community, wins for the environment, wins for kids, wins for donors, and wins for the volunteers that result from the Hug It Forward project.

Wins for the Environment

Trash out of the Streets

With many places around the world lacking trash collection or disposal systems, building bottle schools offers the benefiting community – and surrounding communities that aid in trash collection and bottle stuffing – an incentive to clean their streets to provide a cleaner and healthier environment: less contamination, healthier people, more attractive surroundings. Tourism is a huge industry in many communities and cleaner destinations make for happier tourists.

Trash out of the Air

In many countries, trash collected in homes is burned outside and at times even inside the home in open wood-burning stoves, creating toxic fumes inhaled by family members and contaminating air supply for neighbors, as well as producing greenhouse gases which contribute to global warming.

Trash out of the Water

A large percentage of trash finds its way into river systems, washing massive amounts of waste out to sea and onto beaches, affecting the livelihoods of thousands dependent on fishing and tourism, and also adding to the large-scale garbage problem in our oceans.

Trash out of the Land

Plastics and other waste leech chemicals into the earth affecting ground water and soil quality. Many bottle schools that are built in agricultural communities across the world which could suffer badly because of this. Agriculture in villages is often the only form of income and is relied on for the survival of the community.

Helping Animals Avoid Trash

Unfortunately plastic bags, cups and so on get eaten by animals that are around and like the smell and taste of whatever was in the plastic before. Cats, dogs, goats, cows - all these animals have been known to eat toxic plastic, which stays in their stomachs until they die.

Wins for the Kids

Educational opportunity

The school will provide a safe, clean and ample environment for generations of children to study and improve their mental capacities. This improved education bodes well for the development of the community at large, especially when young girls have opportunities to stay in school longer.

Girls especially benefit

Studies continually show that girls who stay in school longer marry later, have fewer kids (more control over their bodies), provide more resources for those kids, act as their kids’ first educator, teach their children the value of education, cook more nutritious meals for their children, and have higher self-esteem and respect.

Pulling communities out of poverty

Meeting the infrastructural needs for a school building is the first step in the chain of pulling communities out of poverty, by encouraging homegrown solutions to take root and flourish in an educated populace.

Environmental Education

The lasting lessons of environmental protection and proper waste management are even more important than eliminating trash from the environment. These will prove far more substantial as the adaptive minds of the children involved find unique solutions to their communal and personal waste problems.

Empowering youth

The end result of a school construction project is predictable, a building with four walls. However, the impact of lessons learned through collecting trash, stuffing bottles, and constructing the building are unpredictable in scale and quality. Unharnessing the capacity for youth to solve their own problems, can bring about global change.

Wins for the Community

Enabling Community Leadership

Building bottle schools fosters project design and management skills that can be implemented on future community development projects.

Everyone contributes manual labor

Bottle schools provide a unique opportunity for the entire community to participate in the construction process. For example, mothers help stuff bottles to make eco-bricks while fathers contribute manual labor on the construction site by shoveling sand, mixing cement, constructing bottle walls and applying cement.

Child Participation

The kids in the community play the biggest role in collecting and stuffing bottles. They construct their own school. Kids are also the greatest force for moving materials: sand, gravel and bottles.

Although their load per person is small, we have found that their enthusiasm, speed and sheer number of participants make quick work of hauling tons of sand, gravel and bottles to the construction site.

Pride and Ownership

All of this toil and sweat amounts to a grand investment from the community for its future development as an educated, healthier and wealthier village.

Their investment encourages an ownership of the project that may not be present in other endeavors that do not require such a high level of community involvement, planning, execution and labor.

Communities are accountable for their project from start to end. They are inspired and driven to make it a success. Community love is embraced and felt right from the beginning of the project and continues through to the end, where the celebration of love is powerfully felt at the inauguration.

Empowerment

Bottle schools provide children with a sense that they have the ability to shape their future and their world and helps them to think outside of the usual constraints of an impoverished lifestyle. Building a bottle school gives a community the confidence to choose and shape its own future.

Solidarity

Schools unite communities around a common cause. All children attend the same school despite religious differences or other factions between adults. Every family of the community is required to donate a certain amount of time and labor to assure the project’s success.

Boost to local economy

All materials are purchased from local vendors and all skilled labor is contracted to local workers. That money circulates within the community, creating ripples of impact for local business owners and vendors.

It impacts the local venders with direct tangible support along with the economic boost locally. Additionally the intangible impact can be felt though the support given by being a part of a community coming together to get the complete a school construction project.

Sustained Change

From our experience, many communities have gone on to create new projects based on the inspiration of the bottle school. In Granados, the Mayor started a community-wide trash management program because his constituents enjoyed the clean streets. Other community leaders, like Marcos Xe in Sepalau, serve as spokespeople to teach surround communities about eco-brick construction and the boon of improved waste management.

Not to mention the fact that the kids utilizing these new classrooms will grow up with a change consciousness for respecting the environment and, hopefully, a keen eye for creative local solutions.

Wins for the Volunteers

Local volunteering

One huge advantage of bottle school projects is the opportunities given to local school children to volunteer their time and efforts through collecting bottles and assisting in the construction of a school to benefit their fellow countrymen of lesser means.

What we do not want to do is throw large sums of money at infrastructure needs and projects without actively involving the local people of the beneficiary communities in the process, nor encouraging them to make their own investment in their future.

Often, communities where bottle schools are built are not of sufficient economic means or size to amass the 10,000 bottles and tons of trash needed to complete their school. Without the participation and assistance of hundreds of school children from the surrounding region, their projects would likely never be completed.

Foreign Volunteering

American volunteers donate time to help build bottle schools, working side-by-side with local villagers to make the project a success. The team of volunteers bonds with each other as they spend time living and working together in a new and wondrous environment. By spending time in a rural community, volunteers are able to experience a side of humanity that many would never encounter if they visited the country as a “tourist”. They learn that despite our apparent differences, we are all one people.

Volunteers experience first-hand the power of community, the focused energy of a close-knit group co-exist and co-create their destiny. In today’s individualistic and materialistic “developed world” society, many of us have lost the understanding of what true community is. During their time they experience, a genuine two-way exchange of culture, values and knowledge takes place. Volunteers see the depth of gratitude and appreciation expressed by the local people who through their collective effort now have the infrastructure necessary to provide their community with education that they have worked so hard to achieve. Volunteers leave with a new awareness of the real problems facing communities in developing countries, an awareness that is so different to how things are portrayed in the media back home.

Wins for the Donors

Addressing many different needs with one donation

Few development projects anywhere in the world address so many needs within the scope of a single project. Educational, environmental and community development goals combine in a multi-faceted way to provide a vast range of benefits to communities who build bottle schools.

The chance to participate side-by-side as one people

We encourage major donors to visit the community where the bottle school is being built and participate side by side in the building process. Not because their labor and skills are particularly needed, but because all parties can learn so much from this interchange. We believe that making a donation does not need to be simply about writing a check: it can be a more participatory and genuine human experience.

However, please be aware that safety concerns and the particular nature or area of the project may make it inadvisable or impossible to visit some bottle school sites at certain times.

Value for money

By building using “waste” materials and by utilizing the volunteer labor of the entire community, bottle schools provide an excellent value for the money. Donors can see exactly where their money is spent: on the ground in the community where the bottle school is built, not on salaries or overhead.