Fight plastic pollution in the bay of Cartagena

2022 is proving to be a year of opportunities and surprises! While starting slowly during the first 3 months, in April the energy rocketed to the sky! We celebrated our first ever Plastic Fishing Event with Corona and over 90 local fishermen participated! With a record of 4 tons of plastic from the sea, beaches and mangroves, the effort left us dreaming of winning this never-ending fight against plastic pollution! The event left a major positive impact in the community with the donation of a plastic compacting machine for the local recycling association. p

The basis of it all is the education! Our educational program Clean Seas: Guardians of the Ocean is gaining track with four new schools taking advantage of our workshops and beach clean ups. Volunteers from Cojowa, Montessori, Gimnasio Everest and the public primary school in la Boquilla Sede San Felipe are making strides and becoming guardians of the ocean. Our workshop in la Boquilla the 1^st of June was amazing with 23 students per session for 1^st, 3^rd and 5^th grades. Girls and boys from la Boquilla learned to separate residues and of the importance of preserving their beloved ecosystems. Then, they played fun games reinforcing all they had learned! We hope to broaden the scope and work with more public schools in the coming months, so please help us reach more students through your generous donations!

Thanks to the involvement of the Latimpact congress we were able to organize a cleanup and mangrove planting in Punta Arena on April 24th. Many thanks to the 38 volunteers from Latimpact and to the members of the community with whom we planted 50 mangrove trees! The goal was to mitigate the carbon footprint, aid this vulnerable swampland regain equilibrium and fortify conservation efforts and intent within the community in the island of Tierra Bomba.

Another great milestone reached during April was the ESMT team visit, with an amazing group of committed and brilliant students who analyzed in depth and recommended great improvements to the Foundation´s organizational and operative structure. Many thanks for their contributions and energy. We miss having them in our events and activities and hope they will come back soon!

The educational effort to organize a sunset workshop finally took the perfect form. Many thanks to the support from Escuela Taller and their historian Rodrigo Alfaro, who conducted an amazing historical workshop, while we touched upon the environmental importance of our bay. Coming soon our very own hearing aids for these workshops reaching a higher level!

Thank you for your continued support to our project and our work. We hope you will continue supporting efforts to rid the ocean from plastic and to strengthen the education within our communities and city. If you come to Cartagena please join our sunset educational workshop in the bay. We want locals and visitors to learn about the environmental, cultural and historical importance of the bay. To learn about the bay enables us to love it, in order to better care for it! Thank you for reading!