Vanier Earth Day!

Who would’ve thought that I’d participate in an activity occurring in Jake’s Mall! I never interest myself to the events that occur at Vanier College during school times; however, this time, I had to and I’m glad it was so, since Earth day on April 22nd was quite interesting and fun!
On this day, Karine, Sofia and I informed other students about issues in the developing world. Although the fact that there is a lack of clean water and food in third world countries is known to all, we explained to them the reasons for this problem, showed them pictures and gave them shocking statistics. While explaining to others, I felt like I was specialized in my topic and could talk for hours about this issue because I spent a good amount of time researching about it for my research paper. Individuals were listening carefully, while we were informing them, because we all know about the poverty in poor nations, but we gave them thorough reasons as to how a decrease in the amount of food was due to farmers suicides, companies who lied to India for their own profit, etc. It felt good to raise awareness about this subject; however I believe that as students, most of the explanations we gave them would probably slip their mind one day or another, thus it would have been nice to collect money at the same time as well, to give to a fund such as WFP, World Food Programme. With this, we’d not only raise awareness, but we would help directly to the cause. As an adolescent, issues such as hunger push me to want to make a change, but raising awareness does not help that much because it does not directly help to reduce hunger rates. If I gave money to a fund, I would know that I actually gave some food to a person who may have been near death due to a lack of food or water.
Other people’s booths were really interesting as well. I loved that there were activities outside too! People were planting spices and using solar energy to boil water. Since the weather was nice, it felt like Earth Day! Additionally, I got a free recyclable bag and reusable water bottle, for signing a petition against plastic water bottles at school! It was worth staying there for 2 hours, since I raised awareness and others taught me about other issues, ways to help our Earth, etc. as well. One fascinating booth was about vermicomposting. There was a bunch of earth, worms and organic matter in buckets. The organic matter was decomposing; however the worms made this process go faster and resulted to a richer earth. This activity was compelling because it was not only people speaking, but you saw the worms; it was sort of interactive. It was interesting to learn that worms could better our earth; this thought never crossed my mind. Also, another attention-grabbing information was that you could actually cook with worms! Recipes were posted up on the board and although it disgusted me, it was surprising and I definitely learnt something new from that booth on Earth Day. People should inform themselves about this because they can recycle their organic waste. As a result, the soil will be richer and there will be less garbage in landfills, which better our environment.
Earth Day has made me think twice about not participating at activities at Vanier. Next time, I hope my curiosity will help me to walk around and actually look and listen to what the people at the booths are trying to get us to be aware of.