Waste management skills

NADIA CLARK,

The sixth graders of our school travelled from Kathmandu to Hetaunda on November 7, 2011 to learn about waste management in the region, and to spend time with Hetaunda’s Reliance School VIth grade students. We spent five days there, doing activities that helped us to understand waste problem in Nepal.

The Reliance students were friendly and cheerful, and not that different from us. To get to know each other better, Lincoln and Reliance would take a hike together.

We visited the Municipality building for a lecture on waste management. All the garbage that people have when they are walking, is thrown on the side of road, as — people have no trash cans to put garbage in, and people think they have the right to throw garbage wherever they like. Also, when garbage is collected, they dump it near the river, which pollutes the water.

We were also allowed to give suggestions, and ask questions. Someone asked why the trash was not recycled. Nepal does not have the right technology to recycle such wastes. The government is figuring out ways to get enough money to buy the technology. We all took notes and thought about ways we could do to help the environment. The teachers put us in groups after the lecture. We recorded different garbage we saw, and discussed where would be good places to put trash cans on the streets.

That evening, we practiced our musical, River Child, with Reliance. The musical is on importance of water and how we use it. We sang together.

We made posters based on the information we gathered. We were split into three groups — one group to paint a friendship mural, one group to paint the outer wall of Reliance School, and the last would donate 40 trash cans to shops nearby.

On the fourth day, we performed environmental skits we had created earlier. My group had made one on the 3R’s — Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Other groups made theirs about deforestation, water pollution and waste management. Different groups had made graphs, drawn pictures and some people even stuck on the trash they saw.

In the evening, we performed River Child to a small audience. We also had a small quiz about Hetaunda. My classmate, Bhum, was announced the Most Memorable, and was given a carved elephant from Reliance. We had learned about waste management, did fun projects and made some wonderful friends. Overall, Explore Nepal was a success and was enjoyed by all the VIth graders of both Lincoln and Reliance.