Community Care Day

One of the other CAS's I'm in, besides my core CAS is Environmental Council (an ecology group). the leader, Hilary (my second year from Oregon) organized, with the help of the rest of the team, Community Care Day. This was a day when everyone came together and cleaned up trash from the city. It was advertised around the city that we would meet in certain areas of the city that especially needed cleaning and pick up trash for several hours. When the students arived in one of the areas, it was already completely clean already. Another oginazation had seen the posters and orginized themselves! Another area where we were working at is a huge memorial park for the soldiers who fought in the 2nd world war, called the Partisan's Memorial, which hadn't been maintained in a really long time and is mostly a party place, or so it seemed by the number of beer bottles we picked up (literally thousands). This place was so covered in trash, at one point I stood in one place and filled up a garbage bag within arm's reach. We worked in two parts of the park, the area you see in the photo, and then a reflecting pool that was full of floating bottles and plastic bags. Once I started cleaning it was so hard to stop, and even though at some points it seemed like there was just way too much to even make a difference, in this memorial, or this city, or this world, all the trash we are creating is just overwhelming! But after looking

back at an area I had cleaned it felt so good. now that small place is a better place in this world.

In total about 12 of us collected over 130 bags of trash just from this memorial park alone... here you can see them and the dupster behind which used to be empty. Here are some shots of one of the areas we cleaned

BEFORE & AFTER