Earth Day

As a tradition (can it be a tradition if I only did it 4 or 5 years?) during the spring track and field season at Burnsville, we would have an Earth Day run.  We would follow our 5 mile route with garbage bags in hand – some of the girls wearing my reflective running vests for safety and we’d pick up garbage throughout Burnsville.  The runners, though skeptical at first, would grow to anticipate and love the event.  I tried to bring this enthusiasm for recognition of the importance of keeping our environment clean to Hungary – though it was not met with the great excitement that I had hoped.  On Earth day, I wore a shirt that said “reduce waste” on it – which was a bit foreign to my Hungarians since they call garbage “rubbish” (damn British English) but after I explained it and then asked them if they knew what day it was, I got the most blank stares I’d seen in a long time.  They had absolutely no idea what the holiday was –even when I had prompted them that it was an INTERNATIONAL holiday!  To which one of my students responded with “so do they even celebrate it in Hungary?”  I gave a little background on Earth Day, which brought some snickers since a senator from Wisconsin named Gaylord Nelson started it… oh to be 14 again.  At any rate, I produced two different types of garbage bags for the students, large green ones and small yellow ones.  I had a grand plan that we were going to use some of the pieces that we had collected to write stories about, so anything “special” should go in the yellow bags.  All the other garbage was to be put in the green bags.  If you’ve been following my blogs, you know that Tata prides itself on being clean – the dream team has been out since the flowers first started blooming and though this was a concern (I anticipated there being very little garbage) I still thought we’d find some stuff it we went around the lake a bit.  Not only did we not find much garbage, but the only “special” things they found were beer cans and condom wrappers.  Ugh.  They also were not thrilled with the idea of picking up “rubbish” but they did it anyhow – even with me wearing a bright yellow safety vest.  When we returned to the school, I collected the “special” items and put them all together, and got rid of the green bags of garbage.  I set the “special” items on my desk and was going to leave them there until Friday when we wrote our stories.  Well, come Friday, I find that the bag (which to the defense of the cleaning ladies) was in fact garbage, was thrown out without me knowing it.  So, I quickly gathered some things from the office and they wrote their stories about those items.  I suppose it’s a good thing since I wouldn’t want to have them write stories about condoms and beer and making connections between those items.