To celebrate 2014 Environment Day a puppet play “Bhagwat” was prepared by Sangeeta with 14 local school kids to promote Nishtha’s Clean Green Rakkar program which has been successfully functioning for over 200 households in Rakkar village. In addition, an illustrated handout was produced which explains how to segregate household waste in three languages: Hindi, English and Tibetan. This handout will be given to every household involved in our programme as well as to the local shops, schools, temples and so on.
The theme of the play was about how the animals get together to revolt against the human race when they realize that human beings are polluting the river and not segregating their garbage and disposing of it properly, so it becomes a threat to animal life. It touched on the most important local issues: water pollution and garbage segregation.
Our plan was to show this play in several places, to assist us in mobilizing more and more people towards the garbage program. We therefore selected two of the schools involved in the Nishtha school feeding and development programme and one local Kindergarten on 5th June (Environment day). It’s not easy to do three shows on the same day, but our team wanted to make the most out of this special day and the prevailing interest in environmental issues
The first show of the day was performed at Rakkar School at 11:00am. We set up our stage and performed to 78 kids from the middle and primary schools. They really enjoyed watching how the puppet moves on the stage and the different voices of the characters, especially since the performers were mostly their classmates. We then talked to the children about garbage management and handed out the new leaflet.
At 1:30pm we arrived at Chakwan School where 65 kids and their teachers were waiting eagerly to see this puppet show. They were very happy at the end of this show and all joined in the dance with the puppet show team. We handed out and explained the pamphlet where we mentioned how to segregate their domestic waste.
At the end of the day we did our last show at Norbulinga in Euro Kids school, 30 to 35 Local kids and some foreigners and local people enjoyed the show. Before starting Mohinder talked to them about our Clean Green Village project and had an interactive session on how to segregate their waste. By the end of the day we were tired but we felt we had managed to contact as many people as we could and make this day meaningful.
