Interview Prince & Princess of Environment And Surabaya Festival by Curtis Deschambault

This weekend was an eventful one with the third round of selections for the prince and princess of the environment on Saturday and a parade in the cultural festivities on Sunday. Saturday started off with a little bit of rain but became sunny again just time for the prince and princess process. I did the registration for both the morning and the afternoon sessions. The morning session started at 8:15 and there were 36 students registered. The students were split into 12 teams each containing three students. The teams were then asked to sit in front of the group and each of the students than discussed one of the picture we should them about the environment. The afternoon session started around 12:00 and also had twelve teams.  Doing registration was nice because I got to practise my little bit of Indonesian with the children.

Once the teams were done with their discussion, the students than had to go do an interview and explain what they wanted to do after they finished the prince and princess program. I was the person who got to ask them the question and I asked them in English. There was somebody with me who would translate what I asked if the students did fully understand it. The students were all pretty happy to answer the question and a lot of them had good ideals like planting trees in empty spaces, getting the school to pick up garbage for 10 minutes before school started. There were many other great ideas that they children had and hopefully they can follow through with them so that Surabaya can become a greener city. Out of the 72 students, 30 will be selected for the next round of the process.

The event was held in one the city’s parks which was very clean and green. The park had many trees and plants and provided a nice break from the busy city. The park also had deer and other animals at one end, which the children were able to feed. The park was very busy with students from various schools enjoying their Saturday activities. In Surabaya, Saturday is day for the students’ extracurricular activities. The park was very clean and it was nice to see garbage cans distributed around the park, allowing for people to throw their garbage into the garbage cans instead of littering. Seeing the amount of people who were enjoying the park, illustrates that that people of Surabaya enjoy the environment. Perhaps there should be plans for more public parks in Surabaya.

Sunday was eventful day with the cultural festival and the parade. The day started out very nice with the temperature in the high 20’s, but by about 12:30 it started to rain. When the parade started at 2:00 pm it was still raining, however, the rain had slowed and was not raining very hard. The parade had many floats that were decorated with various flower arrangements all of which were very nice. Despite the rain there was still a large crowed that came out to watch the parade. We at Tunas Hijau handed out pamphlets to the crowd about reducing their energy consumption and also about using bicycles to get around.  The parade was a lot of fun and it looked the crowd had enjoyed the parade as well. One thing I did note was how fast the cleanup took place. By the time we were done the parade and returned to where it started, there was little trace that a parade had taken place.