CITY OF PLASTIC BOTTLES (Artemovsk)

1.08-14.08.2005

The project was aimed to raise awareness of residents of community of Artemovsk through public actions, installation of special trash containers, created by children, and distribution of information materials.

The main specific feature of camp was small amount of participants. Only two volunteers – Heinz from Switzerland and Miriam Lahmer from France managed to get to Ukraine. So, it turned out that we have camp of five participants. For my opinion, in was rather interesting, because such an amount of people allowed to get acquainted with one another more closely and to create such a ‘felling of small family’.

First part of camp included painting and cleaning in one of houses. This house seemed to be well cared and rather cozy comparing to average houses. In spite of it citizens were really surprised with it that somebody is painting doors and washing windows in their habitation. People were very curious about our activity and its usefulness. Majority of work that we did could be done by local residents without any outsider help. Maybe that was some encouragement for some of them to start acting, because they wanted to show that they also care about place they live in.

Also our work camp activity included painting of carrousels in Artemovsk City Park. This kind of work was more pleasant because we were painting on the fresh air and had opportunity to entertain ourselves on attractions in Luna-park for free. But organization of our work was on very low level. There was no day when we could start our work in time. This was caused by numerous reasons: firsts they hadn’t enough brushes, then our paint was over (in spite of it that supply of tools was ok), next mornings we couldn’t found any representative of park administration to explain us our task for day. Possible reason of such misunderstandings is not enough high awareness of park direction about volunteers activity. It seemed like they’re not sure if we should do anything in park.

One more aim of our camp was creating of puppet play following topic of environmental pollution, trash collecting and utilization, etc. During one week we invented two possible plots for performance and finally changed them to third version which was based on well-known ‘’ Antikhlamosoria’’ by Vladimir Majstrenko. He was our creative supervisor and producer. Under his direction we succeeded to make anti-trash performance with participation of native Pertoushka, Poli Shinelle from France and Kasperle fromSwitzerland. On 12th of August our camp participants, Vladimir and two actors of puppet theatre from Konstantinovka (Anja and Oleg) showed our masterpiece in summer camp for children with disabilities ‘Vognyk’. After our visit to that camp both sides were impressed: children were surprised by seeing unusual performance and meeting alive people from abroad, we were shocked to see such a children-invalids and were happy to bring them some cheer. Next days we made show in volunteer camp in Kleban Byk, but it was not so successful and impressive. From the other hand here volunteers at last have got an opportunity to meet more various personalities from different countries.

During these two weeks in our free time we’ve visited Salt Mines, Slavjanogorsk Monastery and Factory of Sparkling Wines. Salt Mines and Factory of Sparkling Wines are main and the most famous sightseeing places of Artemovsk and its neighborhood. Mines are really worth seeing for many reasons: huge undergrounds, perfect acoustic, fairy-tale atmosphere and everything around looks like made from ice… I really want to repeat that experience! Our foreign guests were also fascinated with such an amount of beautiful salt.

While visiting Slavjanogorsk we saw chalky caves, wood monastery and various churches. This day we really saw part of history interaction of church and soviet government and learned sad and tragic story of this monastery in connection with Artjom.

Our group also visited Factory of Sparkling Wines which is unique enterprise of wine industries in Ukraine and the largest champagne plant in Europe.

In summary I can say that our small division of volunteers painted all doors, marry-go-arounds and trash boxes which needed to be painted. Maybe, we succeeded to make not so much, but enough to attract attention of citizens. Finally it turned out that topic of our camp ‘City of Plastic Bottles’ was mentioned only in puppet play. In spite of it I hope we achieved main aim – to make people think over their own vision of peaceful existing in environment, to make step forward to understanding: if something is wrong or not very nice then you shouldn’t claim, but try to make it a bit better.

By Galyna Uvarova