Today is a special day for the town of Labuan Bajo, Flores. Today Labuan Bajo is hosting a “Cleanup The World 2014” event to create a clean, beautiful and comfortable town for the local community and visiting tourists. The focus of the Labuan Bajo cleanup day is to clean up Labuan Bajo’s streams and rivers, and prevent plastic and other waste from flowing into the ocean.
Clean Up The World 2014
The six MantaWatch Interns were awake early this morning, and in great spirits. At 06:30 we arrived at the District Office for the opening ceremony, where the Regent of West Manggarai gave an inspiring speech. He said, “Labuan Bajo is a tourist destination that draws people from all around the world to see our Komodo dragons and beautiful underwater ecosystems. We must all work together to keep this town clean.”
About 300 participants joined the event, including students, teachers and volunteers. After the speeches, the participants were divided into groups, given a location to focus on, and presented with cleaning tools such as gloves, sacks and rakes. Together, we then started marching down the road to our cleanup location.
Students from SMKN1 Labuan Bajo, local businesses and the MantaWatch team get stuck in
Trash in Labuan Bajo’s rivers flows to the ocean and dive sites
We found ourselves working in the area that people said was the dirtiest! We found lots of plastic clogging and blocking the stream, including discarded baby nappies and other nasty things. But even this did not break our spirit, and we kept working to make this town clean.
After four hours of hard work, our stream looked completely different. Where there had been piles of plastic bottles and other trash blocking the stream, now the water was flowing freely. It was great to what an amazing transformation we’d achieved after a few hours of the community working together!
Before Cleanup Day 2014
After Cleanup Day 2014
We joined all the participants at Pede Beach for lunch and a closing ceremony. The Bolo Lobo band were playing some catchy tunes, making everyone forget the tiredness and begin to dance.
And then it was time for an important event. The announcement of the drawing competition winners from our trip  to SMKN 1 Labuan Bajo tourism school. Runner up prizes were awarded to 15 students for the creative and inspiring pictures. And finally two student were awarded the top prizes to become Ambassador and Assistant Ambassador for Earth Day 2015, and received a PADI Discover Scuba Diving course.
Winners of the Clean Labuan drawing competition
After lunch, the event ended with everyone painting their handprints onto a signboard – a symbol of all the hands that participated in Labuan Bajo’s Cleanup The World event 2014. This was a really fun moment, with everyone suddenly transformed with color as the students chased each other around painting hands and faces!
After a long day we wearily headed home to clean ourselves up. But the day wasn’t over yet, and we gathered again in the evening to plan our video diary and prepare for the following day’s survey.
A tiring but a special day, and we’ve left behind many clean rivers and over 1,000 sacks of trash!
