Recycling for Refugees

We all give in our own ways. 

I wrote this down in the last week of last term, on a sunny day, on the oval outside SKiPPS, as Ayla, Cleo, Isabella, Katerina, Zhara, Jude, Jo Jo, Otis and Vinnie all got to work, gathering and sorting and counting the cans and bottles and plastic. 

They worked as a team, and knew what to do – they just got to it, the job at hand – and these middens of materials were made on the grass, and elsewhere boys played football by the boundary line, and five girls did somersaults, and I sat on an upturned milkcrate, exhausted (mostly from the previous school I’d been to, but also this: life can be tiring), and watched, admired. 

‘There are a lot more this time,’ says Jo Jo, and he is right.

Jude spots a liquid paper board box of a ‘brekkie’ drink, a product she says has been developed by her father, and she tells me all about it.

‘It makes me so happy to see this,’ she says, and it makes me so happy to see this, to create this opportunity, for children, for them to further express their emotions, their thoughts.

We tally 75 eligible glass bottles, 324 aluminium cans, 216 plastic bottles, and 35 liquid paper board boxes (including the Nexba rich chocolate liquid brekkie!). Total = 650 items. Each worth 10c through the container deposit scheme. Last night I transferred $65 into our fundraising bank account, and put all the children’s names with the donation. It can be seen, here: Shout For Good

(Also – for better bookkeeping - I’ll soon transfer the amounts of previous weeks, adding the names of all who help each week).

We all give in our own ways. 

Parents and children at SKiPPS are bringing in containers to their school, and donating them to this cause. I am giving mostly my time – being at the school to do this, but also driving often to Dandenong to process the items, and the other week I drove there to door knock real estate agents and find a rental property for the Afghan family, soon to arrive. Three wonderful people within the SKiPPS community – Lucy Saliba, the Daly family, and the Turner family – have taken it upon themselves to give even more, donating directly to this initiative. 

Thank you all for being part of this giving circle! 

By term’s end we’ll likely have raised the $500 I challenged the children to gather. Great job!

I cannot be in this week – got a labouring job I’ve committed to, we all do what we need to do to get by – but I’ll be back at SKiPPS next week, itching to count cans with the kids!

Dugald