World Conservation Day 2004 Activities

 As You might know on 5 of June in 1972 in the Swedish City of Stockholm the United Nation Organization declared this day to be the "Day of Conservation". 113 states took part in this declaration and obliged themselves to take an active part in protecting our planet from ourselves.

 To make not a "conversation" but a conservation day we started several activities on the weekend of 4-5-6 June. 

One of them was a fotograf exhibition, taking place in the Nail Çakırhan – Halet Çambel House of Culture and Art. The motto was "Colours and Roots" and it was part of UNDP/GEF Project.  Irene Cantez in  her part  "Colours" showed us the beauty of things we see every day but tend to not see them anymore. Bahar Suseven in "Roots" shows us the earth-tied life of people living from nature, like basket making, adobe bricks and olive oil production. Most of us realized, how far away we are today from the "roots" of an independant an original living style.
 

 On 5th of June, we invited all children of Akyaka for a children festival with lots of games that all had a consevationist background, of course. Explaining the food pyramid, everybody "became" an animal, and had to look for food or possible perdators. We collected (clean) waste in record time and had alltoghether a lot of fun.

In the evening we were guests in Akyaka-İnişdibi. Mr. Mehmet Deniz and his family had prepared a beatiful dinner for us. As this part of Akyaka is a bit away from the touristic part of our village, we used the opportunitiy to explain our views of nature protecting and modern living in harmony. We had a presentation using our new projector for the first time and could show the structure of our UNDP-Project as well as a short presentation about modern moskito prevention.

On 6th June we  walked right through our little wetland, crossing different habitats. There was quite a lot of people gathering  near Gökce, where we had a walk of about two hours. In hot weather, everybody became hungry in the end, so we found a place for pide and ayran, the local yoghurt-drink that is best if you have been swetting a lot...

We had all been very much pleased to see our new young mayor Ahmet Calca taking part in most of this weekends events. That gives hope for the future..