Granada is once again gearing up for a festival, but this time one that we can really rally to… Called the Berrinche Ambiantal, this is the first ever “annual” street performance festival to be held in Central America.
Organized by a group of local expats, this festival will bring to Granada over 150 artists from Central America for three days at the end of January… There will be street theater, puppetry, street acrobats and musicians. That would in itself be something fun to look forward to. But this first year, the theme is environmental. There will be a concerted effort to use the traveling troubadours to spread the word on environmental best practices. This converges well with the efforts of another expat whom we blogged about before regarding her emphasis on painting murals with environmental messages regarding the importance of cleaning rivers that flow into Granada’s lake.
So with this in mind, Peta joined the bandwagon and donated a large painting of the Granada market for a fund-raising auction.
It was also an opportunity to reconnect with a French
painter, Jean Marc Calvet, who has made Granada his home and is developing a solid reputation as a “self taught” artist, with good following on the New York and Miami art scene. A full length documentary has been made on Jean Marc Calvet as he is an interesting person and his work is quite unique. Here is the work he gave for the auction.
On a different track, we are proud to be part of Granada’s first recycling program. For some reason, recycling hasn’t taken here yet (in fact, there is quite a bit of trash in the street as there are no public trash bins). So our neighbor Warren has connected with a Managua recycling company and we decided that we should lead by example. Meetings took place with our neighbors on our street Calle Corrales and… voila, the Shambala Corral was born. Simply put, all participating families (some 50 on our street) were handed plastic bags, given training to separate plastic from glass, from paper and cardboard. Peta has offered her studio as a first collection center (until the recycling movement takes hold and then we’ll look for another location). There will be volunteers to “man” the recycling center on the hours it is open; and the truck will come from Managua to pick up, for the first time, recycled material from our street.
The street representatives voted on this innovative green initiative and the proceeds from sale of recycled products will go to pay for next year’s Christmas party.
Doing our part… one recycled trash bag at a time…