This is a photo taken in a Lower East Side supermarket. The girls in the Girls Gone Green program at the Lower East Side Girls Club went to the super market to see how many toxic cleaning products versus how many environmentally friendly products the stores displayed. These cleaning products have volatile organic compounds, which are liquid solvents that evaporate rapidly in at room temperature. When people clean their houses with these products they breathe in the toxic chemicals. As you can see in the picture the supermarket has more toxic cleaning products than non-toxic.

Yesterday we went to a café and began reading a book called “Kiki Strike”. Based on what I read of the book, it is about a girl named Ananka who wants to find out about underground worlds. One day Ananka came across a girl in her class who she had never seen before named Kiki Strike. Kiki said something in class the immediately got Ananka interested in her, she said to her principal that when she grows up she wants to be dangerous. Soon after that ananka started following her.
While we were all reading the book Ananka saw Kiki at Marble Cemetery which is on 2nd ave. When we found out it was so close to us we decided to go visit the cemetery. First we went to The Bowery Hotel that had a view of the cemetery. After that we went to the entrance of the cemetery which was locked because only family members were allowed to go in. The thing that was so unique about the Marble Cemetery was that there were no head stones because the graves were one foot under ground. There were stone walls that had marble plaques with the names of the people.

Even though the gate was locked some of the gardeners let us in to look at the cemetery. While we were there, the head gardener told us how the graves were set up and that the people were buried there during the 1800’s. There was a disease going around and they didn’t want anybody else to get it so they buried them deep underground and enclosed them in stone doors. The gardener also showed us a bunch of bugs which were really disgusting and nobody had a camera so Renee and Jenny had to run there so we could document the experience then write a blog about it. When Renee got there she was really excited because she’s really in to the book. She also held a banana slug which secreted its waste all over her hand.

This morning we saw a movie called The Garden. The film was about a garden in South Central in the city of Los Angeles. The garden was taken care of by the people of the community. The people who used the garden were going to be evicted by the owner of the land. The owners name is Ralph Horowitz. The people had been farming there for over 10 years and now they were going to be evicted for reasons they didn’t know so they decided to fight against Ralph Horowitz.

First they went to the City Council and the Council said that they couldn’t help them because the land was rightfully Ralph Horowitz. But after that, they still didn’t give up and they found out that Ralph Horowitz made a deal with the city and he sold the land for much more than it was worth. He sold it for 5 million and then the city sold it back to him for the same price.

After that he told the people in the garden that they could buy the land for 16.3 million. I think he told them that because he thought that they wouldn’t be able to raise that much money. But the farmers began to fundraise money to buy the land. They had 5 weeks to raise the money. By the end of the 5 weeks they raised 16.3 million dollars but Ralph refused to sell the land to them. Soon after all of the people were evicted. On the day of the eviction the farmers had a protest in front of the garden and some were beaten and arrested by the police. And they also had to watch them destroy the crops that they worked hard to grow for ten years.

The farmers were devastated. Soon after the city gave them land but the land was under power plants and there was also cement still under ground. Some other farmers started farming again and they sold their crops in a farmer’s market in Los Angeles.