GVI Kenya

Friday the 27th of November celebrated the Muslim holiday Ede.  The Mkwiro villagers were busy all day cooking feasts with their families, and to join in the fun we decided to dedicate our day to cleaning up their beautiful mangroves.  Mangroves are home to many critters and we spent much of our clean-up avoiding crab holes and watching the crabs scurry out of our way.  We spent about two hours cleaning up garbage and debris that has accumulated over many years on the beach.  At high tide the water reaches up high enough to carry this garbage back out to sea and so it is important to keep it as clean as possible.  In the future, the villagers will participate in the clean-ups and learn the importance of protecting their beaches.  After seeing the amount of garbage we collected in just a small area in a short time I think it will occur to them how much is actually littered. Hopefully it will come as a shock and they will want to change their habits.

 Beach clean up

Two hours in the hot sun was hard work, but it was very rewarding to know we were directly affecting the environment. Among the trash was some pretty neat stuff too! I found a shipwreck emergency packet of drinking water from a Chinese ship and there were plastic bottles that would crumple at your touch, they must have been decades old.  The trash we found can be burned, and the glass can be recycled.  Mohammed, a man in the village, uses flip flops for jewellery and so we donated the ones we found to his workshop!

 Marine team in the mangroves

I look forward to doing more clean-ups with the community involved and passing on the awareness of the environment. If only twelve of us participated in the beach clean-up and left with over 15 bags full of trash, old flip flops and glass bottles, imagine what the community could do. A little bit will certainly go a long way. 

Sarah Watson collecting flip flops and water bottles