Humidity, Muscles and Sweat

What’s more fun than waking up on a bright Saturday morning to jump into a sticky, wet and overgrown mess of a lake to clean it up with nothing but your bare hands and wit? That’s right, absolutely everything tops this experience – of course, I’m just joking.

The Thalangama Wetlands is a unique biodiversity hotspot in the midst of a rapidly urbanizing area in Thalangama which is home to over 100 species of birds and many species of unique vegetation. Over the years, the lake has been plagued with many invasive plant species, most notably free-floating salvinia, that are disrupting the ecological balance in the wetlands and surrounding areas – especially by lowering sunlight and oxygen levels in the lake. 

In order to clean the lake and preserve its biodiversity identity from urbanization, the Thalangama Wetlands Watch was set up by the local community comprising many volunteers who regularly schedule clean ups and monitor the lake’s health, if you may. The clean ups range from getting into kayaks and rowing across the waterbeds whilst removing invasive species, to jumping into the lake itself and manually removing all invasive plants. 

I joined a cleanup organized on the 2nd of December 2023 by Pay Drechsel – one of the veteran members of the Thalangama Wetlands Watch. I was joined by volunteering secondary students from Colombo International School (CIS) as well as Pep from OSC. Our work was not in the slightest easy – from manually hoarding heavy nets full of salvinia to filling up large buckets of salvinia to hoard onto the shore whilst in the lake, everything was very labor intensive. Nonetheless, we had a good laugh and lots of fun – spotting various little insects and birds as we performed our due duties assigned by Phi and collaborating whenever we could into groups to hoard in large and heavy nets of vegetation. I stayed to provide my services for roughly two hours before I realized the 14 deadlines next week were not going to fulfill themselves – rushing home after a completely exhausting morning to study for that dreaded differential equations test.