Southern Road Trip & Awareness Campaigns

Last weekend we took a nice touristy road trip through the southern and south western part of the island. We first saw a crater lake in the heart of Mauritius that is a sacred Hindu place. As the legend goes, the water comes from the Ganges River in India.  There are statues different Hindu gods, a temple, and places for people to make their offerings.  It was awesome to see the Hindu relics and the like because we don't really have any of that in the US.  And their religious artifacts are so colorful!

We also went to one of the main tourist attractions in Mauritius called the Seven Colored Earths.  Here, the chemicals found in the soils transform it into different colors when it settles. I don't really know the scientific reasons for this, but it looks pretty awesome!

We've done some good helping the environment deeds this past week here in Mauritius.  One really big environmental problem here is that everyone just litters everywhere.  Everywhere you go there is trash on the ground.  We did a visit to a preprimary school to talk about recycling and throwing away your trash.  These children were very small, so we did fun activities for them such as making bracelets out of paper, throwing things into a pretty colored garbage, and a play about sea turtles getting stuck in plastic.  These children only spoke French, so those of us who know French had to take the lead in the activities.  The children seemed to really enjoy it, and when we gave them candy at the end, they all threw their wrappers away in the trash!

We also had a visit to a private elementary school to do a clean up and talk about the importance of recycling and not wasting things.  This was a very nice school, and the kids all spoke English.  They were also very educated about the environment and used terms like "biodegradable products".  One of their teachers told us they were doing a unit on the environment, and for good deeds they got "handprints" and for bad deeds they got "footprints" to signal a carbon footprint.  These children are much more fortunate than most of the children in Mauritius because they go to a very expensive private school and learn about protecting the environment.  This is not commonplace in Mauritius now, but hopefully in the next few years they will begin teaching the importance of environmental protection on this island nation.  

We also did a cleaning campaign at an old police station while some people from the local village.  The best part about this was that they took us in the back of a truck that collects sugar cane to the ocean.  We drove through the sugar cane fields on the dirt road to the seaside.  We saw many workers cutting down the sugar cane (or burning it in most cases). Truly great experience!