San Juan Bay Estuary Program Executive Director's Updates (More info @ www.estuario.org): Weekly highlights for the week ending December 20th

Christmas celebration at Fishermen’s Peninsula in Piñones and Casa Taft:

Our AmeriCorps VISTA volunteers participated in the community of Piñones’ Christmas celebration on December 19th. They set up a San Juan Bay Estuary informative table, which featured estuary-themed coloring book for children. Our ongoing participation with Piñones is part of our VISTA’s project for the identification of opportunities for economic growth within the community.

Meanwhile, our sister initiative Casa Taft in Santurce celebrated their Christmas brunch and held a garage sale.

“Christmas would be better with a dredged channel!”:

Commissioned by our education manager Javier Cardona, 13 students between grades 3rd-5th created conceptual drawings of how they imagine christmas would be in their community if the Martín Peña Channel was dredged. The drawings have been posted in our Visitor Center’s exhibition gallery.

Preservation of the oral history of communities within the watershed of the San Juan Estuary:

Our Estuarine Oral History Project continues. We thank professor Mario Roche for dedicating his seminar “Portraits: creative and in-depth interviewing” (COPU 6725 of the University of Puerto Rico in Río Piedras) to interviewing our community leaders. From Piñones to the east to Las Cucharillas Wetlands to the west, from Caimito deep upland to Capetillo in the urban center, Roche’s students interviewed many residents who have taken part in the transformation of our watershed. We plan to publish these and other interviews -documented since 2007- in a volume to be released next year. We thank the Puerto Rican Foundation for the Humanities, the Environmental Protection Agency, AmeriCorps VISTA, the Interamerican University and Proyecto Enlace of the Martín Peña Channel, who helped ideate this initiative back in 2006. Ten years of hard work have passed, but the Oral History Volume is coming soon. Let’s consider this an act of history to our memory, our people and the watershed we inhabit.