Inspiring by Example

Nowadays many people seem like have no care for the environmental health. The most things shown are by throwing trash anywhere; in the river, street, park, ditch, etc. Trash is the big problem for our environmental health, for a small trash can cause the big bad effect in our future environment and our earth as well. Anyhow, some people do not care for it, they think that environmental health is the responsibility of the cleanliness officer, but our future environmental health is our obligation. We must keep our earth and our environmental health and we can start from the small thing; keep our environment free from the trash by putting it in to the right place –trash basket- ,   As we know, trash can be recycled to be something new, or we can reuse our trash. So it is very important to separate our trash; organic and non-organic trash. Those activities show that we care for our environment. It also can reduce the causes of global warming which becomes the hot issue in this century.

Due to the carelessness of the environmental heath, the alumni of the VDMS in Banjarmasin are motivated to invite the people in Banjarmasin to take care of our environment, especially people in the car free area (around A.S. Musyafa Street), to put the trash by giving example to the people and ask them to involve helping and taking care of the environment. We ask them to collect the trash at least a plastic bag full. The full trash plastic bag can be exchanged with a bottle of juice that has already provided. To implement this program, VDMS alumni have cooperation with Iqro Club (on the first activity) and with one of association in English department, ESA (English Student Association of FKIP Unlam) on the second activity. They support the program and hope it can run regularly. The program started from November 24^th, 2013. We have held the program for three times; the second was on December 8^th, 2013 and the last-we hope that it is not the last- was held on December 15^th, 2013.

We chose Sunday morning on the car free day to conduct such program, because on the car free day there are so many people in the Sabilal Mutaqin Mosque (around A.S. Musyafa Street) who do weekly jogging, biking, playing football etc, so it is a good opportunity for the VDMS alumni to invite them do some cleanliness activities around that area, while they keep their body health by jogging, they can keep the environment healthy. Not only invite the people do some clean up in the Mosque area, in this opportunity, the VDMS alumni also persuade them to throw their trash in the place provided by the government. It should be great to increase our environmental health awareness, so that we can make our earth safe and clean. It is hoped that they also apply what we have done (by taking care of the environment) in their own life.

The warm response we got from the people who do jogging. They asked what the program for and they were very interested with the program, so they participated with the program by putting the trash in its place. Most of the participators are children, it can show that this program bring the children up to care for the environmental health. It also creates their character which does care for the environment. On the first activity, the journalist from Kompas TV invited us for an interview session. It was represented by M. Rijali Riyadi. On the second activity, we met another social organization and shared several things, and on the third activity we met a teacher of MAN 2 Banjarmasin who said that she is interested to apply this program on the school.

I as a VDMS grantee think that this activity is very interesting, useful, and helps us to gather with alumni and grantees. We do really appreciate for the VDMS who support us to implement this program. The support is very helpful for us so that we can improve our social activity day after day. However, if we start with the small thing and start it from ourselves, we can hold the world and do the big thing. (Dwi Handika Kristianti – grantee from Lambung Mangkurat University)