Recycled Recreation
Bienvenida a Casa Del Niño!!
NAME: “Recycled Recreation” at the Dorothy Byrne Casa Del Niño
COMMUNITY: La Independencia
LOCATION: Malacatan, San Marcos Guatemala
PARTNERS: Solace International, Asociación Desarrollo Integral Casa Del Niño (ADICN)
PROJECT SPONSORS: WebManage Pty Ltd.
PROJECT DESCRIPTION:
The United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child states that every child is entitled to ‘Leisure, Recreation and Cultural Activities’….too much in developing countries, a child’s focus is on survival. For this reason Seres has chosen to work with the children on the site of Casa del Niño to give them the opportunity to reclaim these rights and enjoy a happy childhood.
Tire swing
Casa del Niño is a home and vocational training centre for disadvantaged children in La Independencia, Guatemala. Since January 2010, Seres has worked with the project sponsor Solace International and the local community to design and build the Casa del Niño to be a low-impact, ecologically sensitive and self-sufficient site. Once the major construction was complete, the “Recycled Recreation Project” involved the children in designing and creating their own play space, using the values that Seres brought to the site.
Collecting tires.
As the name suggests, the Recycled Recreation Project had two main themes:
Recreation and Recycling.
The goal of the Recreation theme was to involve the children in designing and building their own unique play space where they can indulge in their given right to be a child. This project will empowed the children to participate in decisions that affect their lives. It gave them the opportunity to be creative in a way that will allowed them to accomplish a finished product that they will call their own for years to come.
The United Nations declared 2010 the ‘International Year of Biodiversity’, and the Recycling theme of this Project introduced the concepts of ‘reuse and recycle’ to protect the biodiversity of the area by working with locally sourced recycled materials and ‘green’ technologies such as ferrocement and eco ladrillos (plastic bottles filled with plastic bags and clean rubbish until it is hard like a brick!) to create a space that was pleasing to the eye, to the children, and to the environment. The project demonstrated the use of green construction methods and encouraged both the children and the wider community to begin to think in terms of sustainability, and their role in protecting the diversity of their eco-systems.
Eco-ladrillo benchseats: a smart use for trash!!
The project is complete. Have a look below at the progress updates, and the incredible playground that the children of the Casa Del Niño created with the help of Seres!
PROJECT UPDATES:
Click on the links below to see the progress of the project.
The ferrocement playhouse.
