Diary of a Patriotic Corper: Environmental Sanitation CDS

When I think about my environment and how we take care of the earth around here, I think nothing. My mind's blank because it really isn't something that is keenly practiced here. I mean, in the five years I spent at the university, I never really saw it as a common topic.

On a second thought, perhaps I am the one who never paid much attention to such activities and engaged in them. All I know, growing up, has always been to keep my environment as healthy as it can be—and I try to—but the truth is, not many people don't care much here.

If anything, there are many things we do that kill the environment and ultimately make it unhealthy and unsafe to live in.

We all have our roles to play in keeping our environments and protecting them, but it just appears that many are rather fixated on minding their business. The government and their responsibilities, too, are something we usually aren't sure of.

Today is Earth Day, and I am only just learning about it today. Out of all the 190 countries practicing it today, mine isn't—as far as I know.

I don't consider myself an environmental activist anyway. And the only thing that ties me to caring for my environment is the community development service group I belong to, Environmental Sanitation.

You see, I have been serving my country for the last 10 months under the National Youth Service Corps programme that lasts a year. And after spending 3 weeks at the orientation camp, they assign you to a place of primary assignment somewhere within the state you are deployed to. Thereafter, you are assigned to a community development service group, and there are many of them.

Once every week, we gather to meet and, you know, serve the community we were assigned. Being the Environmental Sanitation CDS, our job is to tidy up environments, essentially. So we often find ourselves going to different locations to tidy them up on different days. Recently, however, we did something different.

We thought to take our environmental sanitation activities up a notch, and so we reached out to a couple of organisations and requested permission to carry out certain activities. One of which was a secondary school.

At the secondary school we went to, the idea was to enlighten the kids about their environments, what it means to have a healthy one as well as an unhealthy one, how they affect us mentally and physically, and how and why they should do better.

Before splitting the kids into 10 groups, they had to first understand why we, the serving Corpers, came to see them and also motivate them for the activities coming next.

I handled one group, and I started with 10 kids. With time, five more joined. And then they chose to name themselves "Teenagers of Light." How self-inspiring.

After speaking with them about sanitation, health awareness, and the cons of an unhealthy environment, we proceeded with what we were going to do for the day. And that was where the fun started.

Motivating them was a success, and so the enthusiasm they had was just enough to get them to work. And the only thing we could do at that moment was to clean up their environment, so we went to do that.

Their school environment seemed like it wasn't regularly taken care of, and it had a lot of litter in many places. Two of them held the trash bag in their hands while the rest went around picking up litter and putting it in the trash bag.

Since there were nine other groups, the school was cleaner on time. Afterwards, we all converged, and we conducted a small competition amongst them where each group presented a representative and explained their activities and learnings for the day.

Part of caring for your environment, I believe, includes enlightening people—particularly the younger generation—how to keep the Earth healthy. And that was one of such experiences in this CDS group I belong to.

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