Today was a big kind of day.
As part of Global Youth Service Day, a local private high school selected our neighborhood for a clean up. As the neighborhood representative, I had to handle all the logistics (the teachers, thankfully, handled the kids). We had over 100 sophomores sweep through our streets cleaning up garbage along the roadways, in empty lots, dilapidated buildings, and at four separate dump sites (where people outside the neighborhood deposit all kinds of ugliness in our alleyways and dead ends). In three hours, these kids collected at least two tons of garbage.
Like I said, it was a big kind of day.
For those of you (probably most of you) who don't live with this level of littering (I almost hate to use that word because "litter" doesn't quite encapsulate the scope of our garbage problem), I'm not sure you can imagine the impact this has on my life and the lives of my neighbors. It's huge, really huge, huge in a way that brings tears to my eyes.
I have so much hope, and sweat, and love and anger wrapped up in this place we call home. Today, we won one for the neighborhood. We won one for the earth. It's probably the biggest Earth Day present I've had the good fortune to deliver.
Big or small, I hope your Earth Day was good.
5 comments:
Ellen - that is awesome! We have a good amount of litter in our neighborhood - somehow the city is always dirty. Oh well.
that amount of trash is unbelievable! so happy for you guys/ the neighborhood to have those student volunteers help in such an unbelievable way!!! :) glad they showed up, too!!!
Good Job!
Well done!
God bless all.
Love, Aunt Kathy
Yowser. Send those boys down our way...
My company does a huge Earth Day push... we are big on volunteering anyway (giving $500 grants to groups where 5 or more associates volunteer) but for Earth Day we really stepped it up. I took part in my first organized work volunteer event. I cleaned up a local park across the street from where Alex will go to school next year. As I was pulling junk from the creek in this park, I really felt good. I was so sore the next day, but I felt so good that we cleaned up so much trash and junk from that park!
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