Spur-of-the-moment Sayao beach clean-up

"But keeping a clean environment, particularly, keeping their beach clean is a concept that apparently, has not seeped into their minds. Plastic and all kinds of rubbish are just left scattered ashore. Have they ever engaged themselves in the coastal clean-up of their own beach, one could ask, and certainly get differing answers. Why not, one might ask again, to more differing answers..." (Earlier post).

Out of curiosity, we took time to have a look at Sayao Beach to check if the area has really been cleaned up, as reported to us by a resident, of all sorts of plastic debris that occupied the whole area, including the water that was simply dirty, the last time we were there. We hadn’t been there for over a month, but what we saw was an obvious attempt or attempts to rid the entire area of plastic as it looked cleaner. But not quite. There were many piles of rubbish just about ten meters away from the highest tide, and there were still many longstanding plastic trapped in the growth. We were told that the youth cleaners decided to just bury most of the hundreds upon hundreds of kilograms of plastic within the beach periphery, and have identified a place they would enclose with a fence where the remaining rubbish would be buried later.

There were children swimming and having fun in the shallow, murky water. A boy found broken bottles underneath and realizing the danger they posed to his playmates, threw them ashore as hard as he could that the pieces landed in the bushes. We found an opportunity to challenge the children to do more cleaning please on this side of the beach, getting rid of all the remaining plastic and broken bottles they could find, so swimming could be more fun.

They happily jumped out of the water, conducted their own amazing clean-up, and probably taking the cue from what they saw done by the older beach cleaners who did the same thing days or weeks before, buried their collection beneath the sand farther away from the water. They decided to just make a bonfire out of the coconut husks, dry leaves and all sorts of sticks that they gathered. In no time they declared ‘tapos na po’, finished.

Kids proud of their unique achievement.

Some went back to the water to swim again. For some reason, like the sea was probably more calm than earlier in the day, the water cleared. We also jumped into the water to swim.