On July 8th, 2006, Heartspring welcomed 57 students ages 11-15 to its first summer camp ever. The nine days that followed were filled with games, songs and various activities addressing environmental issues. The first five were designed to get the children thinking about their relationship with their environment as well as to inform them of various environmental issues. Some highlights from this part of the camp include a guest lecture by the Chief Representative Officer of Ladakh, a clean-up project in Leh (the biggest city in the region) in association with the Women’s Alliance, as well as an Environmental Science “Fair” in which each counselor put together a station addressing a different environmental issue (e.g. global warming, biodiversity, etc.)
    The second half of the camp was devoted to various art and performance projects, which were presented at a festival on the last day of the camp. Two groups did skits (in Tibetan), another two put up an exhibition of various art projects and the fifth group presented a musical piece using trash as instruments. The camp was extremely well received by both the students and greater community.
   In conjunction with the summer camp, Heartspring worked on a few initiatives to bring environmental awareness to the greater community. Besides the final festival and the clean-up project in Leh, one such initiative that Heartspring put together was “the battery project”. Batteries contain heavy metals and other hazardous chemicals that can cause severe environmental and health problems if not disposed of properly. Since Ladakh, and even India has no battery recycling infrastructure, Heartpsring put in place an awareness campaign through posters and a radio program calling the local community to bring their used batteries to drop boxes in specified locations. Heartspring also distributed materials in most of the guest houses and tourist hang-outs, asking tourists to help Ladakh’s environment by bringing a handful of used batteries back to the West to be recycled properly.
   Heartspring was blessed to have the financial support of 27 individual donors. The budget of just over U.S. $2000 covered all of the camp expenses, including warm lunches for all participants, salaries of the Tibetan counselors, camp t-shirts, transportation during the camp, and all of the necessary supplies. It did not, however, cover any of the lodging, food or travel expenses of the Western counselors.
   Besides the significant financial “energy” that went into this project, Heartspring is also grateful to the volunteers without whom this summer camp would never have come to be. Eight Western volunteers contributed a total of 1200 hours to this project.