Foreigners and locals clean up a portion of the causeway on World Cleanup Day
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- Category: News
- Published: Sunday, 07 October 2018 12:08
- Written by Bernd Riebe
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By Bill Jaynes
The Kaselehlie Press
September 15, 2018 – Pohnpei— This morning, volunteers from the Micro- Japan Club at the College of Micronesia FSM, students from Reitaku Uni and Risumeikan Uni in Japan, JICA volunteers, Ambassador Rieko Horie and his wife Yuko, Japanese Embassy staff members and Masahiro Michishiro picked up a truckload of trash on the causeway.
The effort was in celebration of World Cleanup Day.
A Pohnpeian volunteer expressed his disappointment at the amount of trash that residents of Pohnpei carelessly discard on the causeway and elsewhere. “They come out here and eat lunch, and just leave their trash for others to pick up”, he said. “We should expose them! It’s shameful.” The purpose of the cleanup was not to shame but to reclaim the pristine environment that should be Pohnpei.
All too often, volunteers walk the streets and villages of Pohnpei to clean up trash that is carelessly left behind. But by the next day, or sometimes even while the cleanup is happening trash is refilling from behind the people doing the cleanup.
Organizers seemed to hope that residents of Pohnpei will eventually get the message that it is their responsibility to clean up their own discards and that every item discarded carelessly stacks up with other people’s discards to create a monumental mess that should not be ignored. It should not take a cleanup program to keep Pohnpei clean.
