Tuesday, October 12, 2010

International Coastal Clean Up

This day was definitely hard. It was a real challenge just to bring everyone together in school with the short amount of time that was given to us. However, I surprised how many people actually signed up from Brent. It was good to see people take a stand  and clean the beach.  Planning wasn't as hard as actually doing the activity and keeping people persistent. The bus took a long time to get there in the morning and people from the lighthouse kept telling us to all sign in. I was worried because they were late and I kept having to tell the people at the lighthouse that everyone from Brent wasn't fully here yet.

I was one of the 6 leaders first to arrive.  It was nice working with people who actually took the time and effort to clean the beach. I picked  up a lot of garbage particularly plastic, foam, diapers, slippers, and even toys. It was difficult to get everything started because getting the word out to everyone to get working and to contribute. Once we finally started cleaning everyone was contributing for the first hour or so. After that everyone started to grow tired and lazy. I had to go over to them and asked them to please get back at it. I mean I  can understand that they were tired because there was so much trash and it looked overwhelming. They still should have put out more effort. I can say a good 13 people actually got the work done and stayed until everyone was finished. The others had left much earlier once they had grown tired.

When we first visited the beach to scope out the area it didn't seem so dirty however once we walked farther along it was a hefty sum of trash. Everyone was starting to lose focus and  I tried to get everyone focused while we were cleaning. There were a lot of plastic found on the beach and as we got farther off there was a huge area full of trash. I was shocked to see how much trash that was created in this far off desolation. I picked up as much trash as I could and something stabbed me in the foot when I took a step to pick up trash. It stung a lot and it was hard to walk. I picked up as much trash as I could and I helped Jana guard our trash people she told me there seemed to be a mix-match of trash being spread. Which isn't going to be an efficient way of weighing everything if some trash bags were weighed 2 times. The beach clean up didn't last as long as it was suppose to be because it seemed that everyone was in a rush to leave however I'm glad that we helped the environment and made the beach cleaner. I mean if people just picked up their trash and threw it in the right bin then Philippines would probably be an even cleaner country. In Philippines there should be big trash cans that have different bins for different trash. I mean in school we have different trash barrels for different objects and creating some for Olongapo and actually initiating something like that would help instead of it ending up on the beach or the street.