We have finally placed the first bottled onto the school!! This is the moment I have been waiting for since May of 2011 when I first saw pictures of the Bottle Schools in Guatemala by Hug it Forward. It is such a cool, new, interesting idea to use bottles stuffed with trash instead of bricks. Yes, it takes a lot more time and energy to stuff bottles with trash (as my community members often remind me) than it is to put down bricks onto wet cement. But I think people in my community are finally starting to get the idea behind the bottle school that we are building in my school. Now that they are getting to see the progress of the construction and see the bottles finally being put up, they can see that it is a real, concrete thing and not just a couple of pictures and drawings on a piece of paper. They are also starting to get really excited about the classroom and have already started telling me what they think the classroom should be used for, which is awesome because they are starting to think of the bottle classroom as their own. I have been wading through tons of doubt and questions for almost two years now warming the community up to the idea and convincing them that a classroom build with bottles won´t simply be blown away by the wind. Now that they can see the whole process happening in front of their eyes, they are now proud that we are the first school in the entire country and the first community to embrace the idea of a bottle school and actually build a classroom. It´s super exciting to see their enthusiasm and hear them tell people who aren’t from the community about their bottle classroom, especially those who were the biggest critics of the project at the beginning.
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