Doing Activities on Kenjeran Beach Surabaya

by Sun Yi Feng – China

This morning we went to the Kenjeran beach. Unfortunately, the beach is far away from my imagination about beach. A large amount of rubbishes cover the beach. Our job is to clean the beach. Students carry big bags in hands and pick up plastic bags from the beach. After half an hour, we cleaned almost most of the plastic bags covering on the beach. However, I don’t think this kind of cleaning is enough. If the residents living nearby are not conscious of the environmental protection, our job is meaningless because they will throw new rubbishes on the beach.

Then students try to interview the residents living nearby. Nevertheless, many of them are not willing to be interviewed. Finally, we get some results from the interview. People living there agree with us that throwing rubbish on the beach is not good. But they don’t have other ways to deal with their rubbish. It is not enough that only depending on some environmental organization, like Tunas Hijau to do some cleaning. We can only solve the problem for a while but cannot solve the problem completely. It should be the government that gives some solutions to this problem.

Firstly, the government should educate the people living nearby the beach about the importance of keeping the clean of the beach. Second, the government should provide some ways for the residents to deal with their living rubbish. Third, the government should force people to do so via legislation. Only with these measures, can we make sure that we have a clean beach.

After that, we plant some trees. It was a hard work but also very interesting. After the planting, students use bamboos to make sure that the small trees will grow straight. We also use the compose produced by students themselves. Planting is really good. However, I can see some big trees were already felled. Leaving slumps there. Again, I think it should be the government’s job for educating people about the importance of trees. Otherwise our job will become meaningless because it only cost 5 minutes to fell a tree which needs maybe ten years to grow that high.