The three Scout groups of San Francisco spent Saturday afternoon constructing this giant flor de lis solidaria;
(photo courtesy of the local rag, me n’ my kids are down there somewhere.) I haven’t figured out how to translate the title, flor de lis in “English” is a fleur de lis, which isn’t English at all but we don’t seem to have a translation for it, and solidaria is somewhere between solidarity and charity but not quite the same as either; without the connotations of pity which surround charity, but without the commitment to “standing with” which we would associate with solidarity. So flor de lis solidaria is the best translation available.
Our aforementioned thing is made out of approximately 160,000 plastic bottle tops, sorted into colours, and laid out as the world Scout symbol across “la plaza civica”, San Francisco’s central square and most important public space. This photo is taken from a small aeroplane and I think it looks pretty good for our hard hours’ toil in the boiling afternoon sunshine. Publicity stunt over, the bottle tops are then transported to Buenos Aires to the Hospital Garrahan which is the national flagship children’s’ hospital, I guess the Argentinean equivalent of Great Ormond Street. The Garrahan have been fund-raising through collecting bottle tops for as many years as I have been involved in Argentina. I have no idea what they actually do with them to turn them into money but I imagine it must be some sort of recycling, like when we used to collect milk bottle tops and ring pulls when we were kids.
