A Basket of Mangoes - Sylvia's Story

As part of the Youth Mentorship Programme this year, our mentees were educated on plastic waste management. The intention was for them to deliver a training on plastic waste management to 1000 students in the primary and junior high school levels. 

The students would go in groups to deliver the training to the students in four selected schools in the community. One of the participants, Sylvia, was part of the first second group to deliver their presentation. Let me digress to speak about Sylvia. You see, Sylvia is in her final year in Junior High School .

Even though she is intelligent and outspoken, she is scared of public speaking. She would shrink and start to fumble when asked to speak in-front of her colleagues. But as part of her project, she had to join her colleagues to deliver a presentation in one of the private schools in the community. You should have seen Sylvia on the day they picked the schools to deliver their presentation. She was so much averted to the idea that she wanted to swap. But that wasn’t possible. 

Well, long story short, after weeks of preparations and rehearsals, Sylvia was able to deliver on the presentation day. The joy on her face after the presentation was just immeasurable. On that weekend, when the second group met to rehearse, Sylvia was asked to redo her presentation and all her colleagues could not help but applaud her. She performed even better than she did at the first school. Well, practice they say, makes perfect! it only gets better with time

Well, back to the mangoes! 

After her presentation, Sylvia decided to surprise the programme facilitator with handpicked mangoes from a tree in her house. But there was a catch, instead of bringing the mangoes in a single-use plastic as that is the usual practice, Sylivia brought them in a basket neatly covered with a napkin!

Wow, now that is some change here. According to Sylvia, during one of the training sessions, she was cited as an example for using single-use plastics a lot. To avoid that from happening again, she decides to carry her own bowl to school to avoid purchasing food in single-use bags and that is the reason behind her choice of container for the mangoes.

“I did not like being cited as an example for using single-use plastics, so I had to choose better alternatives” – Sylvia

It is rewarding to teach but it is phenomenal to see what has been taught being put to practice. Imagine the impact we’d make if more people were sharing their love with reusable baskets and bowls. 

We at #Dreams Arise Ghana do not only feel excited to be teaching the next generation, we feel honoured and humbled to be impacting the world now and in the future. And we got a basket of mangoes for that, what about you, what will you want your basket to be filled with?

Quality education can indeed lead to reformation and sustainable development.