Dive Into Earth Day Report
Added to website: 03 May 2007
On Sunday the 22nd of April 2007, the eighth annual Dive Into Earth Day was organised by the Coral Reef Alliance. Dive Into Earth Day is the international celebration that mobilises environmentally conscious groups around the world to take a stand in protecting our endangered marine environments.
The staff and volunteers of Coral Cay Philippines organised a mass beach clean up of the Padre Burgos area. A total of five beaches were selected and all sectors of the local community were invited to take part.
The Morning
Early Sunday morning bikes, jeepneys and people started to coordinate the days events.
At ten am we were off, staff and vols split around the different beaches armed with rubbish bags and snorkeling gear.
To our great relief the word had spread and people were ready for action on the beaches. One beach had around 20 local men, women and children helping and others had over 100 on each beach! Over the next two hours bottles, bags, cans, nappies and other litter were collected. Two Coral Cay snorkellers on every beach as well to collect from the water.
The Afternoon.
All beaches clean with thirty-five bags of rubbish collected everybody made their way to Padre Burgos Gym for the afternoons activities.
Coral Cay had organised a education/party event for anybody who wanted to come along. Stalls had been set up with the environment as a theme. A few from Coral Cay and also the local Reef Rangers group set up a presentation to show what the findings of their snorkel surveys had brought.
As well as this, enthusiastic volunteers from Coral Cay were busy demonstrating the baseline survey method in the gym which was to great amusement to the locals.
Another objective of the day was to launch our waste management programme for Padre Burgos. This was started with a stand showing our newly painted garbage bins that are to be placed around town to encourage people to keep their streets tidy of litter. A local orphanage, Kinderhilfe, had painted them with amazing cartoon designs all relating to the environment.
Throughout the day people were commenting on the designs and also on the idea of starting a waste management programme in Padre Burgos as there is nothing like this at the moment.
At around 4.30 pm things started calming down a bit and it was time to return to Ampo for a well earned rest. All in all the day was a great success, hopefully the participants of the day have learned more about the environment and reefs on which they rely so heavily. One thing for sure everybody involved went home with a big smile on their face.
