On the 29th of October, I joined the Thalangama wetland clean up. I was joined by Mr Lockwood, Mr Poulus, Ms Melinda and Pep as well as students from CIS. We gathered in front of the map.

Pays Dreschel, the leader/organizer of the clean ups, then showed us the different areas of the wetlands we were cleaning up. He told us how even though this was a protected wetland zone, people still dumped their trash here. It’s sad to see people going the extra mile just to dump their waste in nature as we saw people who had thrown their waste over gates into the water and sometimes into the trees. He then told us about the waste we didn’t collect such as food waste as it would decompose, and ceramics since we couldn’t recycle that. Then he went over the things we did collect but told us how to do it safely for example; broken glass should already be sorted into a separate bag so we would not cut ourselves (spoiler I cut my hands twice through the plastic gloves).

There were 3 groups; one which would clean up next to the road we were on, one that would go through a bit of shrub land and one (that he warned us about how we would get dirty) going into the mud of the lake itself. Me and Pep immediately stepped up for this one and Pays commended us for it. Stating how the OSC kids knew how to get into it. He equipped us with some boots and drove us to the location, as it was on the other side of the lake. When we arrived we were greeted by trash hanging in trees, glass shattered next to the road and whole pieces of fruit chucked into the shrubbery.

Soon enough we had tons of bags filled to the brim with trash. Me and Pep made mental notes and created a story with the trash we found. We hypothesized how two lovers stripped bare and had forgotten their clothes in the passionate moment since we found shirts, jackets and trousers.

Seeing all the waste we cleared up made us feel better, but we knew this wasn’t the end as this waste had accumulated in only 1 week and it would continue until we spoke out to the community about this.

We spoke with the CIS students what they did at their school to help the environment and they told us how they collected empty pens in a big box which they are planning to recycle at the end of the year. This inspired me to think of doing the same at OSC as we have until this point only been recycling paper.

As we were doing the clean up, the men who owned the fruit stall offered us all coconuts for our hard work. We insisted on paying for them but they said that it would be a token of gratitude for cleaning up their areas out of good will.

After all our hard work we had around 20 bags of trash that we had collected. We were happy with how much we had collected, but I was reminded of the fact that the reason we could collect so much is because people kept dumping so much waste into nature. It would be best if there were less bags because that would mean less waste is being dumped. Going forward I hope that we can host more of these clean ups with more people from the OSC community and could even get parents involved.