During this summer with start three weeks ago, the 3th of July, Acarbio together with the municipality of Minori took the initiative to start a project called “Make it blue”.
“Make it blue” with the slogan “In minori, the beach is also mine” is a project that aims to raise awareness about the need to work together in order to keep the nature clean from garbage. The slogan has the intention to highlight the connection between environmental protection and human welfare, to raise awareness of how our actions are affecting the earth’s marine ecosystem and to underline that the marine resources belongs to everyone but that not everyone has the possibility to fully enjoy them.
In Italy, it is very common with private beaches where the visitors has to pay a fee in order to enter the area, this type of privatizing is from my point of view very negative because it creates segmentation between people who can afford to stay there and people who cannot. It is also a question about freedom for the people, I think that with regulations and fees you are taking away some parts of the people’s liberty and it is not a type of world I would wish for my children. Therefore it is important to maintain the public beaches but also to keep them in good condition so that everyone can enjoy the seaside.
Every day all summer the beaches in Minori are full with tourists and residents, in Minori there are two public beaches and it is at those two strands that the project Make it blue is taking place.
During this project we are constantly keeping the public beaches clean and we are also playing games with the children every day from 10 to 12 o´clock. The activities for the children are having different environmental or cultural themes such as the sky, the ocean, the land and the earth. Through these different themes, games and activities we are trying to teach the children, in a fun way, about the environment the biodiversity and how important it is to be careful about our planet.
During this project volunteers from all over Europe are coming to work with us. This is adding an extra layer to the project as we are becoming a multilingual team that also can help to inform tourists from different countries that are visiting Minori. Also the fact that we all have different cultures and backgrounds makes us stronger because we have so much diverse experiences and knowledge to share with each other.
The volunteers are staying for two weeks and then they return to their home countries to leave space for a group of new volunteers that will stay for the next two weeks and it goes on like this during the whole summer until the end of August. For the first part of the project there were two girls from Russia and one guy and a girl from Spain that came to join us. We also had two Italian volunteers to help us, especially with the games for the children. For the second camp one new Spanish girl and a Spanish guy arrived, a girl and a guy from Finland and a new Russian girl. We all were sleeping in the school of Minori and according to me we were having a great time.
It is so much fun and so interesting to be surrounded by people from all around the world, I mean I am from Sweden, my work colleagues at Acarbio are from Austria, Spain and Italy and then these volunteers from Russia, Finland and Spain. So during these days we worked and interacted with the people at the beach and during the evenings we were spending time together. One evening we had a birthday picnic at the beach where the people from Spain went together to make typical Spanish food. Another day we had an international dinner, one night we were celebrating Santa Trofimena which is the saint of Minori. That night was amazing with spectacular fireworks and traditional dancing. Other evenings we showed the volunteers different places along the Amalfi coast such as Tramonti, Positano, Maiori and Amalfi, the volunteers also went to the beautiful island Capri.
I’m looking forward to meet all new volunteers that will join us this summer and I want to say thank you to the volunteers that I have met already. I believe that we learned a lot from each other during these weeks and I think and hope that we will meet again someday.
Written by: Isa Wästlund