Created in April 2016 by Stéphanie Souhaité, the Facebook group Clean St Martin has taken on even more meaning since Irma's visit.
“While walking, I always saw garbage. One day when I went to Happy Bay, as I had a bag, I started to pick it up. I hallucinated the volume it represented! ” she explained then a few days after the launch of the group.
The initial idea was to lead to individual and spontaneous initiatives as well as their enhancement through the publication of photos. But, and this is the magic of social networks, very quickly collective operations were organized.
"This group aims to bring together the photos of the waste that we have been able to collect in nature and the roadsides of St Martin in order to highlight our small daily gestures which, taken together, can have a significant impact on our island. This group is not there to denounce the bad actions of some or the stagnation of others: it is there only to give value to individual initiatives, and to show that the small means of each can make the difference for all. Can we read in the appropriateness written on the page of the group.
To the incivism of certain inhabitants who left their waste lying around has been added the debris of Irma. And voluntary cleaning operations have multiplied.
Since October 2017, and the first post-Irma mission to Hope Hill, the Clean St Martin group has organized more than twenty cleaning missions in different places on the French side.
The last one, which was supposed to be only “a small voluntary cleaning at the pond of the Central Kitchen” gathered around forty volunteers on Sunday 12 August.
“What was supposed to be a small mission finally brought together nearly 40 volunteers! Superb motivation from each of them! It's nice to see that the movement is gaining momentum ”commented Audrey Barbès, one of the four administrators of the page which now has more than 1300 members.
(Photo credits: Clean St Martin)
(Source: www.soualigapost.com)
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