Healing the World: how we can care for our planet

By Nusrat Haque
(Age 18, Bangladesh)

"Heal the world
Make it a better place
For you and for me
And the entire human race"
..........Michael Jackson

I watched in awe as the thirty eight people chorused this in unison till all I could hear was the echo bouncing off the white-washed walls of my classroom. The program ended there and I slowly started my way back home, the lyrics of the song still ringing in my ears. I looked around me and what I saw came as a sharp blow. The roads looked battered and defeated with all the grimy waste thrown over it, there was yesterdays coke can, the sandwich wrapper, plastic bags all meshing together and forming a solid bond that no amount of scraping could clean. For the first time I saw the overflowing drains crying to be repaired and cleaned. This was the road that I walked past for the last twelve years, always running to reach class on time, always ignoring what was happening to the surrounding and always thinking that there were other people who could do something about it. Now I realized how naïve and foolish I was to think that way, how a small effort from me could change people's perspective about our entire surrounding.

In a country like Bangladesh where people received almost no education on creating awareness for the planet it wasn't surprising that people ignored to care for the earth.
I knew it was time for me to step in and lend a hand to really make this world a better place.

The next day at school I knew what I had to do. With the help of my principal we launched our first program; anyone who saved twenty drink cans and submitted them to the school cafeteria would receive a free ticket to the water park which was newly constructed. I held my breath for the next few days and it looked as if no one really took this seriously and no one bothered. But then after almost a week we started receiving the cans and it seemed some of them have been picked up from the roads too. This meant people were littering less cans all over the place. I was excited and knew this was going to work after all. The next day I found myself delivering a speech in the morning assembly on creating a society where we would act like literate civilians and would make a stop in polluting the environment. The principal then reinforced the use of bins and anyone caught littering would have to stay an extra hour after school helping the cleaners clean the school.

I started with my school and slowly worked my way to the area where I lived. With the help of my father and the Rotary Club, where he was the former president, we launched door to door waste collection. People now did not have to go all the way to a certain point in a field and dump their waste from where the government trucks would pick them sometimes even a week later. Now all they had to do was put their waste in their front doors from where the collectors would collect them and then they would be disposed off in the far away waste lands where they would be recycled. Suddenly one could feel the change in the area, there was a less pungent smell in the air that used to come from the waste land pits. The area looked much cleaner and one could actually walk past the fields without holding their breath.

I continued my campaign on creating a better society and encouraged the various clubs like the Rotary Club and the Inner Wheel to start working on various programs so that globally they could start creating a better and healthy society. Pamphlets were made encouraging people not to use plastic bags; medical institutes were requested not to dump their wastes directly to the nearby rivers but to make maximum use of their incinerators. My school organized a student rally where students marched all over the town with banners demanding a green society where they could breathe fresh and clean air.

From that point on it went stronger. People responded more to these programs and suddenly it was not only me concerned about our environment and the society. I knew it was still a far cry from the time when the whole country would stand against polluting the environment but someone had to start somewhere. I guess I just started and I would always look upon the time when we can all sing out

"Heal the world
Make it a better place
For you and for me
And the entire human race"
And feel the pride for making it truly a better place for the entire human race