PASSION; AT THE HEART OF DEVELOPMENT

When I started my professional carrier I did not have a clear path to follow. My first jobs were in different areas of companies, always companies. Year after year I started to feel less motivated. I liked my job, liked what I was doing, the leader that I was becoming but, something was missing.

One day I discovered this sudden passion for the environment, for the amazing landscapes that mother earth gave us. So I started travelling inside my country. In every place that I visited the realities were completely different. The ‘locals’ treated me as family, with such an incredible welcome and a great heart. Some of the local communities did not have basic needs or even worst, they worked the hole day in agriculture for a price that was not fair.

My passion was getting bigger and bigger, I was worried about the amazing human beings that I managed to know from different places of the same country, and also worried about the environment and its growing pollution. I started wondering, how can a country be so different, so unequal and at the same time with breathtaking landscapes and greater amounts of natural resources.

I grew up in the capital, in a really polluted one. By that time I saw a lot of issues that we had to handle and I wanted to put my little granite of sand to contribute in reducing the pollution. So I created a small company of recyclables bicycles. The main idea of the company was to educate the citizens on air pollution and simultaneously to let them know that bicycles are a way of viable and good  transport for the health. I reused the old frames of old bicycles (vintage) in order to reduce the made of raw material, so, less impact. Because I was still working in the company, I could not be able to handle the situation so I had to put it in a standby situation.

Learning more and more about how to struggle with pollution I realized that I could not stayed sitting behind a desk looking how the environment was being destroy by human beings. You cannot think on how to help without seeing it up close. I quit my job and moved to the Amazon. The Amazon has the 33% of the lung of the planet, so I was really worry. When I was there everything came into my mind. Because I am lucky to have this engineering background I could think in how to struggle with the main issue, the river and air pollution. All this technological part of processes came to my mind, the high tech that we have and how to use it in a low tech zone to help social innovation, social inclusion, sustainability and reduction of pollution. I came up with an idea, instead of reducing the use of raw material, why not reusing and recycling the necessary evil that is waste, while teaching how?

GOOD USE OF TECHNOLOGY + KNOWLEDGE = DEVELOPMENT

So that is how I started this new challenge, all united to preserve the Amazon.        During my research I found out that the local communities use the water of the river not only to “take a shower”, but also to cook their food and to drink it.  The main idea is to tackle for social development and enhance their lifestyle by teaching them how can waste be useful for them out of the river. So there are three main projects that converts waste into something else more useful to achieve sustainability.

How can a human being live like this?

The main idea is not to give them the fish, is to teach them how to fish.

photo: Gabriela Pella      place: Rio Nanay, Iquitos, Peru         -2013

As a resume, social innovation, social development, social inclusion and of course, environmental care are the main topics that this new challenge has to deal with.

By not polluting the river, reducing air pollution and give the ‘locals’ a better quality of life, we are going to be able to fight for a better future in the Amazon.

Comments Off on PASSION; AT THE HEART OF DEVELOPMENT / 10 Jan 2014 por Gabriela Pella Fernández
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