Tree Planting in SMA 11 Surabaya And Filming Surabaya’s Mayor by Curtis Deschambault

Today, I went to SMA 11 for the tree planting activity and I met with the mayor of Surabaya. We left the Tunas Hijau office at around 7:15 and arrived at the school around 8:30. Tree planting is the first green activity that the senior high school has planned, they will be doing more activities in the upcoming weeks. For the tree planting activity each class was responsible to bring a tree to be planted. I was able to hep dig the holes and plant a couple of the trees. The students used compost that they had made to place around the tree to act as fertilizer. One thing that became apparent during the digging of certain holes was the amount of garbage buried around thee school.

The second activity for the day was to visit the mayor of Surabaya. Roni told me he is the best mayor in the world and he was very kind when I met him. I introduced myself and also filmed him asking a question for the finals of prince and princess of the environment. After he finished the question, I showed him some pictures of various activities that have participated in since arriving in Surabaya. I also discussed my activities I will be doing with SDK Santa Thereria School. He asked me questions on the activities and about what I think about Surabaya.

The mayor also showed me some the cities activities that are being used to promote protecting the environment. One of the things that the city is promoting is the reduction in the amount of plastic bags being used. Plastic bags are very harmful for the environment as they can take over 500 years before they decompose. The city is promoting the use of reusable cloth bags. They also have a bag that they use for flour which is biodegradable. The neat thing about that bag is it does not start to degrade until it is the soil, at which point it takes 10 days to fully degrade. This technology is very fascinating and hopefully is can be implemented for more uses.

Another interesting thing I learnt was that Tunas Hijau has been invited to an environmental conference in Malaysia. At first, Tunas was going to be able to attend because they do not currently have money to pay for the plan tickets to attend. However, the organisers phoned Roni back and offered him to pay for the complete trip for two people of senior activists of Tunas Hijau. We each good news and now Tunas Hijau are going to send senior activists Nizam and Dony to join the conference in Malaysia. This is very cool especially because how generous the organisers of the conference were.