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Buy Nothing Day 1999:
Report from Panama

By Defensa Ambiental
Dec. 8 1999, Panama City

Since I'm not feeling particularly eloquent tonight, I'll just report on the facts and I'll let you embellish this or do whatever you want with it!

Pre-BND: A couple of press releases, a radio interview, we got a mention on the largest circulation newspaper (lots of people saw it). We did night postering the night before. We had already distributed lots of handmade buttons!

HOW TO MAKE REALLY CHEAP BUTTONS: Make a template with about 30 copies of your button graphics neatly arranged on one letter-size page. Two copies make 60 buttons, ten copies make 300 buttons, fifty copies make 1500 buttons! Go to a mall and recover a few cardboard boxes from the garbage. Paste page on cardboard. Take an x-acto knife or a pair of scissors and cut the little buttons out. Get a hot glue gun (this is the hardest part) and safety pins and paste the pins to the back of your buttons. An alternative is to use little pieces of duct tape. Additionally, if you can get your hands on some of that clear adhesive plastic paper, you can waterproof your buttons before you cut them out with the knife.

The resulting buttons are beautiful and look very handmade, people love to use them (and to feel committed) and it's really cheap moving advertising for your favorite good cause!

BND-morning: At about 4:00 am we faxed the day's schedule to TV, print and radio media. We began the day at 7:00 am by distributing leaflets on a very busy intersection during morning rush hour. Panama has the longest shopping avenue in the world, and this intersection is right in the middle of it. It was a good way to get warm for the day. People had a very positive response and a newspaper photographer covered us. Unfortunately someone stole one of our colleague's backpack with her life's possessions in it, and we had to cut short our first activity.

Later in the morning, a TV station called us and we had a TV interview which aired at the noon news program.

At El Machetazo's BND-afternoon: We went on distributing leaflets, this time around the Universidad de Panama campus. At 2:00 pm we went to one of the largest and oldest superstores, El Machetazo, at the far end of the shopping avenue (Avenida Central). There we began by distributing (more) leaflets and then the street-theater group Satirica Llesca did an excellent play, where a goons working for a gold-faced businessman separated people from their hard-earned money, and ended up putting human bones for sale.

BND was an enlightening experience for many of us, thousands of people either knew about it or celebrated it, and still many people approach us and ask us about it. We had initially thought the concept might not be accepted or understood here, but we were amazed at how much support we got. We are going to have an even bigger celebration next year!

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