Recycled Recreation

LENGUA-LANGUAGE: Spanish

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.

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. Now that the major construction is well underway, the “Recycled Recreation Project” will involve the children in designing and creating their own play space, using the values that Seres has brought to the site.

Before the infrastructure.....

As the name suggests, the Recycled Recreation Project has two main themes:

Recreation and Recycling.

The goal of the Recreation theme is 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 empower the children to participate in decisions that affect their lives. It shall give them the opportunity to be creative in a way that will allow them to accomplish a finished product that they can call their own for years to come.

An Eco Ladrillo

The United Nations declared 2010 the ‘International Year of Biodiversity’, and the Recycling theme of this Project will introduce the concepts of ‘reuse and recycle’ 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 is pleasing to the eye, to the children, and to the environment. This will demonstrate the use of green construction methods and encourage 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.

Juan Daniel watching a video of himself playing with his brother.

The project is currently underway, and weekly progress of the Project will be posted on Seres social networks: the Seres website, Seres Facebook Fan Page & Twitter!

Check on the links below to see the lates updates.

• July Update
  
• August Update