A Tolerable Experience :)

I'm in Ximena Hernandez's English class, and my name is Naomi Juarez. Now, let me just tell you about my spectacular experience at the L.A. River clean up. Now, I know what you guys are thinking. "boring!? lame?! why would you want to do that?!" However, regardless, I had an amazing time at the L.A. River, the only thought I kept pondering on was, why is the L.A. River so dirty, how could we be so disgusting, we should clean it up and make it our new fresh water, and if not at least a place for people and kids to get in the water and refresh ourselves. But no, instead it's so freaking dirty and beautiful but full of our wasteful trash: bags, plastic, bottle caps, and so much more:(.
All in all I had a great time, we didn't find any money but we did have a blast. Here's Bran Bran (Brandon), Vanessa, Caramel(Carmelo), and Steven, I believe lol... Vanessa's guest, we had so much fun. It was amazing. We even had fun with our professor, Ximena Hernandez :D It was beautiful there, I really wanted to get in the water. I found so much garbage, trees and trees full of plastic bags, it was terrible especially when the roots of the trees was growing through the garbage, sweaters and a plastic baseball, carts from target, and other grocery stores, the roots were growing on it and around it, it was insane and just so terrible. There was even a baby's play place there, in pieces but literally every piece was there. It was really beautiful though, it was so freaking hot though. Yet, still an awesome time:) So annoyed by the fact that the water was so freaking dirty and disgusting, if it was clean, it would've been even more beautiful.

L.A. River Clean Up

       My name is Monica Campos and I am in the english class of Professor Hernandez. This saturday was not a normal saturday for me instead of waking up late I decided to go down to the L.A. river and clean it up with my fellow classmates and the people from FOLAR. When I arrived at the L.A. river I was not expecting there to be any trees or rocks instead I thought it was only go to be cement, but once I saw what we were going to clean I was shocked. I have lived in L.A. my whole life and I have never seen trees in the river before. Even though the weather was hot I was curious to see what was in the river and how it looked inside all the trees.

   When me and my classmates went down to the river to start cleaning it up I was suprised because it was very polluted. There were a lot of plastic bags that were entangled in the branches of the trees as well as chip bags, aluminum cans, and food wrappers. It was sad to see how much trash there was but cleaning it up made me feel better. I never realized how much plastic people wasted and threw away. Plastic really damages places like the river because the birds can think it is food and eat it. People should reuse their plastic bags instead of throwing them away or find an alternative. This will help to keep animals safe and alive.

   

Cleaning up the river was a good experince because it made me realize that we need to preserve the wild life that is in Los Angeles and keep it clean. Picking up trash on a saturday was something I was not really looking foward to but in the end I had a good time and learned to always clean up trash and help the enviornment stay clean. Even though this was for english I am glad we did it. This activity made me understand how important the enviornment is and also how it relates to what we are learning in class about the enviornment. It is related to my class by the readings we are assigned as well as the novel No Impact Man which involves a man and his family living a year without damaging the environment in any way for a year while living in New York. I am glad to say that I was a part of something that will help benifit the river of Los Angeles and keep it clean.  

FOLAR Clean Up

Hello my name is Liliana Delgado and I'm in Professor Ximena Hernandez English 101 class. On May 3, 2014 I volunteered at the Los Angeles River to help clean up. My time there was a new, fun and memorable experience. At first I wasn't too excited to go because the weather was warm and I thought it was going to be boring. I was wrong. When I got there, people were already cleaning. I saw the truck filled with trash bags. I was extremely surprised of how much trash ends up in our river. What surprised me the most was that it didn't even look like a river. It looked like a space with trees, rocks, sand and trash. I put on gloves, my FOLAR shirt and sun screen and began to pick up trash. My boyfriend and I filled up two trash bags. I picked up plastic wrappers, glass bottles, cardboard, wood, aluminum cans, plastic bottles, and plastic paper bags. I've realized that all the trash we had picked up wasn't organic. It would take thousands of years for the trash that we had picked up to decompose. My brother, who works for North East Trees, had informed me that they had found a dead cat and a dead bird. People were finding all sort of trash like a baby crib, shopping cart, long pieces of wood and metal sticks. It makes me feel really good to know that I helped my environment. It may not seem as much, but the little effort that each and every single of us do, comes a long way. Watching the documentary of Jared Diamond about civilizations collapsing makes me afraid of what might happen to our civilization. By helping the environment on Saturday, makes me feel less afraid because I'm taking actions. The novel No impact man, the main character is trying not to harm the planet, and although no one else is doing what he is, he still is doing it because he feels like no one else is caring about the wastes we create every day. He is being the change that he wants to see.  Although we don't have control of other's actions, we have control of our actions and what we can do to help our environment. At the end of the day I preferred to have gone to the L.A river than to have stayed home sleeping. I would definitely go back next year and start going to events that help the environment.

          My name is Jenniffer Rodriguez and I am in Professor Ximena Hernandez english class. Today I went to clean up the L.A river. It was actually my first time ever going to the L.A river as well as cleaning eat. When I first heard that we were going to be cleaning the L.A river, I was not too thrilled about it because I thought we were going to find nasty trash that smelled bad. When I got there, I first put on my gloves and grabbed a trash bag. I went down to the river I noticed a lot of plastic bags. In fact most of the trash I had in my trash bag were plastic bags. There were plastic bags stuck under the dirt, on top of the trees. Everywhere I turned to look at I spotted a plastic bag. I was really surprised to see so many plastic bags. I also saw shopping carts which surprised me as well because I thought to myself, " how do these shopping carts end up here and on top of that how do they end up buried under the ground". It is really sad to see how a beautiful place like the L.A river can look so dirty just because of the trash that we throw on the ground. If it weren't for all of the trash we throw everyday the L.A river would be a clean and beautiful river. I say it is a beautiful river because I was able to see the wonderful life in it. For example I was able to see a few ducks. I felt really happy though that I helped make a difference into making the L.A river a better place.I felt proud of myself and I would love to go back.

L.A. River clean up.

                Hello my name is Julio Padilla and I am in the class of Professor Ximena Hernandez, today was not a normal Saturday that I had go to work, instead today I decided to go to the L.A. River to clean it up. This was my first time that I done this kind of activity, for me it felt pretty good and proud to clean the river. When I arrive with my friend Rosana the weather was really warm and humid,  personally I didn’t wanted to be there, because I was feeling really tired and the weather was to hot , I just wanted to go home and go to sleep. As soon as we went down to the river my attitude started to change it felt good to be around nature, even though most of the river is on cement, is really amazing how nature fights against human to keep their cycle.  When we started to pick up trash, most of the time the type of trash that my group collected it was plastic bags. It is really sad to see all the plastic in the river getting trap on trees and rocks. Not only because it makes the river look ugly, but also plastic is really hard to degrade because it takes hundreds of years to degrade completely. After being a good time walking and collecting trash in the river, we went back where we had to put the trash that we had collected. When I got there I was amazed to see all the trash that the whole group had collected in just one portion of the river. That made me realize that our environment is really suffering for our trash that we create. The bad part of the day was that I had to go early because I had to go to work so I couldn’t stay the whole event, but even though I didn't

stay I felt really good helping the community to have a cleaner river. I am really excited to go to another event that involves cleaning the environment. I know that it may look really small the contribution that we are doing to the environment comparing it with the pollution that the whole population creates, but it is better than to don’t do anything.  Now is up to us if we want to take care of our own planet.