World Cleanup Day or World Cleanup Weekend?

World Cleanup Day or World Cleanup Weekend?

With four drives at four different locations we had a cleanup WEEKEND!

Gosh… we were quite busy!

You never saw a very busy person who was unhappy.

- Dorothy Dix

With over 40+ volunteers participating across four events that included watering our existing saplings, planting shrubs and a cleanup drive at Chuna Bhatti we couldn’t have asked for a better weekend than this… Thank you volunteers!

Our volunteers began with watering our native tree saplings in Hauz Khas and Sangam Vihar on Saturday morning. And in the afternoon, we gathered at Chuna Bhatti in Kirti Nagar. We were over 25 volunteers including MCD staff and some locals.

Rightfully, the MCD staff cautioned the local shopkeepers, in this slum cluster, not to use single use plastic bags as it may attract hefty penalties. Some of the shopkeepers delighted us by showing us their dustbins they kept already. Some even asked for alternatives to plastic bags.

Letting go of a habit is tough but our volunteers engaged with locals educating them on ill effects of littering, open garbage dumping and also single use plastic. Some of the locals were still in the mode of finger pointing but we politely insisted them to watch their own actions.

During all such interactions, we have seen kids being far more positive than adults! Even in this one kids were particularly enthusiastic and were far keener to own the responsibility of the park being developed for them.

Continuing our plantation efforts at this place, we planted a couple of madhumalti saplings. It’s a creeper which is also known as Chinese honesuckle or Rangoo creeper. It has medicinal properties in the ailments of parasitic worms, diarrhea, sore throat, fever pain etc.

Let’s take a step back now to also talk about our Hauz Khas watering saplings drive. The team here not only just watered our saplings but also went a step ahead to clear some garbage from these two parks (our plantation sites).

Emulating something similar our volunteers were watering our saplings at Sangam Vihar as well. Some of these saplings needed had broken their stems or twigs, so our unofficial surgeons had a busy day at the office.

And the next day our Sainik Vihar team surprised us. They went for watering our saplings. They didn’t. Cheats! They came back planting some more saplings. Well, don’t get them wrong… Rains had already watered our green friends so this team went ahead and utilized the day.

Not only this, we had another team who visited our Vikas Puri A block district park site to see how our friends were doing there. Our peepal, neem and pilkhan saplings are growing decently. Some even have new leaves. Tiny, tender and red.

Urge to meet more of our saplings was strong. So, we also went to see our saplings on the median of road number 236 in Vikas Puri. We are yet again delighted to share that our alstonia and amaltas saplings are doing pretty well there. However, the place is screaming for a cleanup drive and we’ll organize one soon.

Packed! That’s how this entire weekend was. From our events to meeting our saplings. But this kind of being hectic is good. A very interesting trend lately has been the involvement of more students in our drives.

Day by day, week after week, month after month… Our humble efforts helped us come across a lot of like-minded people.

And here we are now staring at our group’s fifth anniversary! Five great years of volunteering selflessly. Our volunteers believe that cleanliness of this city and our environment is everyone’s responsibility. So, for us, every day is cleanup day, earth day, environment day.

Your involvement is important too! Join us and let’s make our city better: http://wmtc.org.in

(Now read the first letter of each para above!)