I am feeling excited and grateful for an amazing window of opportunity. I am working on a simple document, that I feel will have a dramatic effect on Mt. Province, here where I live in the Philippines. The doc is being developed with my friends in the department of Education who have been involved in the bottle brick process and in a few weeks will be distributed to every single school. It consolidates two years of insights into a simple guide that can direct all the pent up desire of teachers and students and principals to do something about the plastic pollution in their communities.
The guide will show schools how to incorporate bottle bricks into their curriculum and unite for school-wide longterm collaborative builds. Most importantly, the guide will show teachers how to turn the brick making into a meditative reflection on all the pieces of plastic that are being packed. The students will then write their insights and vision for their community’s ecology on the brick itself with a permanent marker. The brick will thus not only be used for building constructions, it will encourage and build a collective vision for holistic communities. It is a bold endeavour in doing-based consciousness raising– because really the problems lie in unconsciousness. I can see all the windows lined up and how this simple guide can have a massive impact– no one is paying me to do this by the way, and in case you wondered, I have no NGOs funding any of this, it is all personal passion.
These bricks will last a long time of course and be like time-capsules of artifacts, energy and vision for future generations– rather than polluted rivers and fields. Here are some of the sketches from the guide to show the schools what they can build with the vision bottle bricks and get them excited. Thanks to Kelsey Brannock, Sarah Queblatin, Niklaus Gerber and Pi who helped with these designs.
