Pangaea EcoCamp – June 5, 2012

Blog written by Leni Gruendi (Pangaea Mongolia Expedition Young Explorer)

When I opened my eyes today, I saw that it was raining. Not the ideal weather to do a clean-up…

However, when we arrived at the school at 9 a.m., 50 excited students from both schools were already waiting for us. They were ready to head to the shore of the river “Iberia” which runs right through Kraljevo.

Equipped with gloves and quite a large amount of rubbish bags, we slowly but surely collected all the rubbish in this particular area. We thought this was an ideal spot since it is right behind the market square, and the people just dump their rubbish over the fence.

It was great to see how enthusiastic the kids were about picking up all the rubbish; one student said, “[We need] to do something good for our environment because that river is such a beautiful place.” In the end, we gathered a fairly large amount of pet bottles which we separated from the other rubbish in order to recycle them. We all had fun, and the students said that they are looking forward to do something like this more often since it is so easy to do but you can see the result straight away. A successful clean-up session came to an end, and we all rewarded ourselves with some ice cream.

The afternoon was used to prepare our presentation for our meeting with the parents of the 16 children who will be going on the eco-camp next week.

This meeting went very well thanks to Vladimir and Nadja who were constantly translating for us, whenever needed. I think the children are as excited as we are and are also looking forward to our time in the National Park as much as we are.