Nicodemus Wilderness Project -- Global Registry of Apprentice Ecologists

The personal background I come from is being a Hispanic learning-disabled student from Santa Ana, California with specific learning disabilities of auditory processing, attention processing, and cognitive abilities that has suffered many personal and family challenges. For example, some types of personal challenges I have suffered through are hampered learning development, living in a corrupt community, and being in a very low family with many financial burdens problems. Despite this, after discovering about the apprentice ecologist project and what types of ways they support the community, it has influenced me to participate in this project on behalf of the Nicodemus Wilderness Project. To clarify, my brother and I have been helping my father with his recycling job since I was ten years old. My father's job is recycling, which involves driving through the city before dawn, searching for recyclable items, and taking them to recycling centers. For this reason, I have always enjoyed working along side with my father and brother because it always feels great knowing that I am helping to improve my community and my world. Furthermore, I believe that it would have been of great honor to help further support my world by contributing to this fascinating annual event.

For many years, my brother and I have been recycling with my father various different places looking for many recyclable items. Some examples of items that we collect are cardboard, aluminum cans, plastic bottles, metal, and glass bottles. Some of the places we go to in California are San Juan, San Clemente, and San Jose Capistrano. However, the area that we conducted my project is San Juan Capistrano, a city in southern Orange County, California, located approximately 23 miles southeast of Downtown Santa Ana. We have done many things for the community, like cleaning up the society, take their recycling items to recycling centers, and prevent further trash build up. We accomplished this is by using a large pick up truck to load up cardboard and pins full of cans, plastic bottles and broken glass bottle. As a result, the citizens and organizations employees are always satisfied with our hard work because we pick up all of their recyclable items that they can no longer hold or throw out for them.

After recycling with along side with my brother and father, I have discovered many reasons on why it is important to take care of the area we conducted my project at. For example, we conducted our project here because it is the best place to support peopleâ€™s businesses, environment, and wellness. In addition, many citizens and different companies need and appreciate our recycling collection business, which is why we decided to help support their businesses and environment together as a family. Therefore, I believe it is very important to take care of San Juan Capistrano because many not only does our family goes there to recycle, but many families within California go here to support this out of shape community. Hence, also the most important reason why San Juan has also been very open mined with giving all recyclers with an equal opportunity to succeed and gain a large profit.

During this project, I have learned and gained many different experiences that have made my whole family and community cheerful. For example, ever since my family has been recycling in San Juan Capistrano for several years, the pollution of this city has always made the majority civilians upset and wishing to live in a cleaner environment especially in 2012. Therefore, since we conducted this project since the being of the year of 2012, then we were able to not only help the environment, but also recycle many items and gain self-profit. Since the community we conducted research on required a lot of clean up work, we were able to improve the basis of the damage and looks of it. One way we contributed is by cleaning up its very disorganized feature. To illustrate, many plastic bottles would be overflowing with bags of plastic or glass bottle, and cardboard would be laid all over the streets and outside of companies and organizations no recyclers would ever pick it up. As a result, whenever we were done recycling for the day, our truck would always return to the recycling center full of valuable items. That is why many citizens and employees would always thank us when we pick up. For that reason, if it were not for us, our project would have been a failure and their city would still be unorganized and unclean.

Thank to the working experience with my father and the apprience ecologist project, I have discovered what my fields of interest are. The field I would like to study is psychology and sociology. My interest is to find answers to why certain people behave the way that they do and what aspect of society triggers them to behave that way. For example, my father works everyday from five in the morning until midnight and comes back very tired, but still refuses to take a couple of days off. This intrigues me to understand what impulses him to refuse giving himself time to rest, despite the dangers against his health. Due to this, my family and I try to convince him to stop working so much, but still, he refuses. As a result, my father influences what I want to study. In my family, he is the best example of dedication, commitment, hard work and determination whenever he is faced with a task. Ultimately, his example has sparked my interest, motivation, and tireless preparation to attend college. I am very serious about my future and I believe that in order to succeed, I will need to follow my fatherâ€™s footsteps and assimilate his ability for hard work. When situations get tough, he is my drive to keep moving forward until I eventually reach my dreams and aspirations.