Throughout the month of July a group of 15 volunteers from different European countries such as Spain, Portugal, Georgia, Turkey, Greece, Croatia, Italy and Romania has taken part in the project called Making it Green. The aim of the project was to promote sustainable development and solidarity in Tramonti commune located near the beautiful Amalfi coast that was recognized by UNESCO in 1997 because of its great physical beauty and natural diversity.

To accomplish the objective of the project one of the tasks was to clean hiking paths from the garbage and to make them more approachable for the citizens of Tramonti and other hikers and adventurers.

One of the paths that was cleaned is Eleonora D’Aragona, which is one of the main paths that links Tramonti and Maiori. This road has been often discussed due to the bad conditions that affected locals and tourists, in fact back in 1459 during her stay in Amalfi the duchess Eleonora D’Aragona had to complain about the poor conditions of the road in Tramonti, afterwards she ordered to repair them. 500 years later, these paths are still neglected, although they require an ongoing maintenance.

Another path that was taken care of was the one that links Gete to Pucara going through Paterno, Pendolo, and Novella.

Since it was July, the sun was strong from the very morning, so volunteers needed to wake up early and take measures to protect themselves from the heat wave.

Coming at the beginning of the paths volunteers were shocked with the scene they found and were even more motivated to Make It Green.

Before starting the activity volunteers divided into teams so everyone had his part into Making It Green. One team was in charge of cleaning the paths from vegetation working with gardening tools provided by the organization ACARBIO. The gardening tools used throughout the cleaning process were rake, machete, garden shears, shovel, gloves.

Some of the volunteers never tried working with that kind of tools especially in the forest environment so they were thrilled to try and get the job done. Other team was given plastic bags for collecting garbage from the path and sorting it into the right categories such as plastic, glass, paper and mixed garbage. During the whole path the volunteers had the pleasure to find all kind of plastic bottles, plastic boxes, abandoned working tools, boots, bricks, rests of ceramics…

To keep the group of volunteers motivated throughout the tasks a playlist was made to have the energy level high without losing the mood. Volunteers had a very good group dynamics with some of them motivating the whole group when somebody was dropping the energy due to the tiredness and fatigue.

However, during the cleaning process not everything ran smoothly as volunteers were bothered by the vegetation and the insects living within, most of them were mosquitoes, flies and one angry wasp that stung one of the participants.

Fortunately, after medication and pills to dissolve the pain, which lasted slightly over one hour, our volunteer finally got better and was then ready for the next activities.

The gift for the volunteers at the end of the cleaning activity was to have strong sense of fulfillment and satisfaction into looking at the great job they did. After completing the job volunteers came up with many suggestions to keep the villages clean and to encourage people to maintain good care for the environment. The participants also made some signs to make people aware of the paths and to remind them that it would be important to keep the environment in a good condition. Aside of these moments, volunteers had the pleasure to be amused by amazing landscapes and historical architecture that will stay impressed in their minds forever.