How it started .
We had done a revamp of our shop entrance, we so badly needed more sunlight streaming in and colour, colour, colour….
I’ve always believed that when you throw lots of colour together, you get an immediate happy vibe! We painted some old garden pots and filled them with red, yellow and white flowers.
The flowers were stolen in less than a week, “Perhaps some needed the happy vibe more than us.” I never replaced the flowers but left the colourful pots out, thinking I would have to come up with another plan for colour, something that no one else would want to steal! So, our colourful pots stood empty and just as well, since they were smashed and broken just a few days later!
Maybe the unhappy people were annoyed that we hadn’t replaced the flowers!!!
On a morning walk, I was overthinking a problem that I couldn’t come to a decision, so I put it out there, to the universe and said, “Put something red in my path if I should go with this, or let me find feathers in my path if you think I should walk away from the situation.” When I reached home, I had 27 colourful plastic caps, 22 of them red, my decision was made but my mind was already pre-occupied with how simple it had been to gather all this colour….. hmmmm.
I knew I wanted to do something that would expose the happy side of all these colourful caps, my mind went into ‘pottery’ mode and I was throwing clay into the wee morning hours until (hoping) something lovely would take shape.
In the meantime, I got my family, both at home and at the shop to start collecting bottle caps. My project manager, Fidelity really picked up on my enthusiasm and he started picking them up off the street while walking home in Chakas Kraal. It wasn’t long before the local kids noticed him bending dawn every few steps and so he got them involved- incentivised by R1 (one rand) for every ten caps they delivered. On one particular day, when he returned from work, there were 24 children waiting for him, all with their little collection of caps.
I, in the meantime, had come up with an idea, one born from again having something stolen! We needed to replace the chain that blocked off the back entrance and I had really come to the end of constantly throwing money at those problems. The more money I spend meant less money available to grow and employ people…. Our “unemployed” percentage was ever increasing.
I was desperate to do my bit to alleviate the problem. When adults cannot find work, it invariably the children that carry the long term effects- no school, no food = malnutrition, illiteracy = drugs, depression, suicide, prostitution, gang life and anger. In a short quick summary, one job could save as many as three children from such a life.
I stood outside my car, searching for part of my earing that had broken, I looked up to see Freedom standing there, watching me, he wanted to help me. This quiet, humble man, Freedom had come to help us on a temporary basis, while we cut back the overgrowth behind the shop. He had five children, no permanent job and “hard of hearing”, so finding permanent work was even more difficult. We found the missing part of my earing, Freedom walked off to the taxi rank, I was left with a lump in my throat.
Then, while trying to re-treat my earing, I got it! I knew what I was going to do with the 4000 plus colourful caps.
Freedom joined us for 4 days a week, he was in charge of CAP-IT!!!
Why CAP-IT?
- we all need to do more to bring an end to the plastic pollution.
- Cap the unnecessary expenditure, more of your budget should go into people.
- Cap the easy trip to the shop, look around and force yourself to find the alternative.
- Put a stop to the “black & white” mindset or thinking. Just put a cap on that bottle of thought. Throw colour around like fairy dust, it has a happy effect.
- Let’s out a cap on the volume of plastic caps found on our beaches.
- Our streets are alive with these little coloured circles, often too small to warrant someone bending down to pick up and throw away. Put an end to this, put a lid on it, CAP-IT and start collecting them.
- If you can come up with a list of negatives to counter the positives in CAP-IT, then put a lid on it, CAP-IT.
- There are already hundreds of uses for the plastic bottles that belong to the caps but nothing that requires these colourful circles just as they are, in abundance! Make Cap-IT a part of your family, do it for your own idea, perhaps inspired by mine, or do it because you love the colourful caterpillars we created!
