Laura Kutner’s trash epiphany came at recess with her sixth-grade students in the village of Granados, Guatemala.
She was a Peace Corps volunteer then, in 2008. Granados was hilly, hot and dry, with a serious litter problem. Kutner helped teachers in the area offer business and life skills curriculums.
She was relaxing with her students, drinking diet soda from a plastic bottle, near two unfinished classrooms. Construction had ceased for lack of funds, leaving metal framing but no walls.
“I realized that the Coke I was drinking was the exact width of [a section of] this metal frame that was just standing there,” recalls Kutner, now 27. “That was my eureka moment.”
Could plastic bottles be fit into the frame instead of cinder blocks to get the project going again? Plastic bottles had been used in construction before, but never quite this way.
After a stirring community effort, and nearly 8,000 bottles later, Granados had its new classrooms. Chicken wire held the stacks of bottles in the frames, then concrete was troweled on to finish the walls. To give the bottles strength, they had to be stuffed with non-organic trash such as plastic and foil. The village and surrounding region were picked clean of litter.
And now, a bottle wall will rise on the Mall as Kutner and her Guatemalan friends — principal Reyna Floridalma and teacher Zonia Garcia — construct a replica during the Peace Corps’ presentation in the Smithsonian Folklife Festival (June 30-July 4, July 7-11).
The Peace Corps might seem an odd choice for the festival. Do federal agencies have cultures? Smithsonian curator James Deutsch said he thinks so, and federal agencies such as NASA and the Forest Service have starred at the festival before.
This is a big anniversary year for the Peace Corps, and the festival program — called “The Peace Corps: Fifty Years of Promoting World Peace and Friendship” — tries to tell a two-part story, Deutsch said. It’s a story about the local cultures where Peace Corps volunteers serve and a story about the shared culture that emerges when Americans form strong bonds with faraway people striving to realize their potential.
Since President John F. Kennedy tapped the enthusiasm of an idealistic and internationally minded generation in 1961 — launching the first three missions that summer to Ghana, Tanganyika (now Tanzania) and Colombia — more than 200,000 Americans have served in 139 countries. Today, 8,655 are working in 77 countries. More than 20 other countries have requested volunteers, but the budget of about $375 million can’t support operations in more countries, Peace Corps Deputy Director Carrie Hessler-Radelet said.
The Peace Corps is contributing $895,000 to co-sponsor its portion of the festival. (The festival budget for all three programs is about $5 million, with the Smithsonian contributing about $2.2 million, and the rest coming from Colombia and other partners, festival director Stephen Kidd said.)
Artists, craftsmen, musicians and community leaders from 15 countries will demonstrate their work on the Mall, paired with Peace Corps volunteers who worked with them in some way.
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