by Ana Buljan, Croatia
On June 11th, our work on RaDiKALA`s and KANE`s project D.R.E.AM. officialy began!
We are a team of 15 volunteers from Italy, Latvia, Germany, Sweden, Croatia, Portugal and Spain. The goal of our project is to make sailboats out of recycled plastic using an innovative process developed by RaDiKALA.
At about 8.30, we left our accommodation to get on the bus on Othonos Square. After a 15-minute drive, we arrived to the school, our destination. The school is our project partner and it provided us with workspace and their facilities.
WELCOMING
The Bougas School where we arrived to welcomed us warmly. We met the school principal, Mr. Bougas, who wished us a warm welcome to Kalamata, Greece and the school. He showed us the school grounds, backyard, the school cafeteria, and finally our workstations in the yard.
PREPARATION
We were divided into groups of 2-3 people, while every group was assigned a specific task. Three groups are working with plastic and the technical part and there are two teams working on social media and content.
The first 3 teams helped Hamid, our coordinator from RaDiKALA, to prepare and set up the work station for working with plastic.
After we gathered the materials, Hamid explained the process of making a loom and plastic cords.
WORK
After the preparation and introduction, all teams started their work.
The Social Media team started preparing and posting content on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
The first team started working on making the loom.
The second team began producing the cords from plastic.
We are using a special mechanism to cut plastic bottles using blades and it only takes a couple of seconds to make a string out of a plastic bottle. Later on, we will use these strings to make nets which we will use as material for our sailboats.
We also re-measured our molds for boats to adjust the length of our cords. The edges of the mold also had to be brushed and polished by the team responsible for handling polyester.
For the first day, it went really successful and I think everyone enjoyed their assignments and had fun.
We`re looking forward to continuing tomorrow!
Stay tuned to follow more news and the progress of our project.
