The tolerance to trash goes under proof

SULLANA CITY, Peru – The people who walked  in the evening of November 10^th at the Main Square got surprised when a bunch of studs with banners on their t-shirts, with the #nolaensucies (“don’t get it dirty” in English) hashtag, began to collect the trash found in the gardens around the traditional pond – Could be they municipal employees?  Could they belong to any NGO?  What kind of activism could it be?

The answer is they belong to the Marketing & Companies Management’s 1^st Cycle at Piura’s César Vallejo University (UCV as its acronyme in Spanish) who submitted the attendance to a kind of social lab for having first imppressions before the fact of throwing trash or seeing the already existent one at a public space, and the reactions have been mixed, from the full indifference to the fact that many persons recorded  them with their cellphones or even they took selfies.

The flashmob-format activity consisted in four dudes gathering the trash, followed by other two with posters where “Is this the Sullana that you want?” can be read leading a collage created with the own gathered trash at the Main Square during 7 days of observation, and the #nolaensucies hashtag as a footer, the UCV’s students Francesco Navarrete and Nicolás Silva explained.

“It left me a big impression because the people of Sullana is very indifferent to the fact of the pollution in their own city,” Silva commented. “But I hope that due to our work, we get some awareness  in them.” In his side, Navarrete ranked the experience as “very good” because it is a way to educate the people about the problem “and a thing I noticed is we reached to persons from different procedence in one only space,” the student stressed.

“I think we have to repeat it and continuing to fight for a clean city,” he astated.  The activation was recorded on video for both studs to analyse the reactions of the persons, so they can have more judgement elements at the time to measure the possible impact, and planning which following actions-to-ddo may be.

Although #nolaensucies  is, in the beginning, an academic project, its promoters did not discard to make new interventions in other spaces of the city, but they declined to reveal which ones and when they will be to guarantee the surprise factor. They only teased  they will look for those ones where there is a lot of attendance, and they requested  other people to summon by using the hashtag, replying the experience in their own communities.