lani_kay
Registered: July 2009
City/Town/Province: Saipan
Posts: 1
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Hello and Hafa Adai! My name is Kalani, I am 17 years old, and I live on the island of Saipan in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), a small chain of tropical islands that are a territory of the United States. I have lived on this island for my entire life and have always been deeply interested in the coral reefs surrounding it. As a young girl, I understood the importance of cleanliness on and near beaches so that the lagoon and reefs could also be clean and healthy, and as a teen, I have participated in a number of beach cleanups to help the reefs stay healthy.
In my senior year at Marianas High School (MHS), I learned that there would be an island-wide beach cleanup, organized by a non-profit group called Beautify CNMI. When I learned that my high school did not have anyone organizing our cleanup as part of the island-wide cleanup, I decided to be the organizer for it, and thus sent out bulletin posts to the students, teachers, and staff of my high school asking for volunteers. I also sought out the help of the MHS-Chapter National Honor Society. Although no other clubs or students responded, I went on ahead and organized a date and time, and after listening to different suggestions, picked out the dirtiest beach on the island and acquired the supplies for the cleanup.
Finally, Saturday morning on April 22 I arrived early to the site to hand out the supplies and the cleanup began! The beach—known to the locals as Makaka Beach—was dirtier than I had hoped. The volunteers and I, numbering about twenty-three, including one or two teachers and a few parents, spread out to different areas that desperately needed cleaning up. While my sister and I tackled the area nearer to the dirt road leading in and which contained a couple of small, abandoned fiber-glass boats and canoes filled garbage, the rest of the volunteers fanned out to the road branching off to the right and to the jungle area behind the road that was used by some people as a dump a few years back. Progress was slow, but eventually, the beach began to look in a lot better shape. The volunteers picked up trash right up to the neighboring hotel and doubled back, picking up the smaller bits of trash they had missed. Soon, we had a pile of trash with everything from an old mattress and TV, to a washing machine and car parts, along with cigarette butts and numerous liquor bottles, of course. After the pile of trash was measured, it weighed about 2, 048 pounds!
I believe that, since that day, the benefits of that beach cleanup have and are still being felt by the fishermen, beachgoers, and tourists of that beach. Now everyone can enjoy the beauty of that area, with no unpleasant trash for them to see. I also believe that the volunteers—who had worked so hard that day of the cleanup—have benefitted from it as well. I believe that they, like me, felt a sense of pride and accomplishment, but more importantly, awareness for the plight of some of our more polluted beaches and hopefully they will remember that day and pick up their litter after a barbeque at the beach—or even better, lead or participate in cleanups of their own. I also hope that in the future when I return to my island after college, I can organize a few more cleanups, and hopefully they will not be as badly needed as my first cleanup was.
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