My name is Jonathan Leal and I'm in Hasmik Barsamian’s English 101 course and our English classes were asked to participate in a cleanup of Cal State La’s, Dockweiler Beach on Sunday the 23rd of October. At first of course everybody was skeptical about it, who wants to give up their weekend to cleanup a smelly beach (JK). I know that a bunch of my class and I were deciding on ways to avoid it but when the day came closer I was actually looking forward to it, I think we all did. With all the focus on the environment being in danger it’s the least we can do. I mean helping pick up some trash on a beach for 2 hours that’s not that bad and it turned out to be fun because we had friends there doing it with us. To begin with we all had to meet up at the beach and I offered to carpool and ended up taking two classmates which I was fine with, helping out the environment after all. We showed up to the beach and to my surprise a bunch of people were there to help, not just my whole class, but a lot more. Then they told us how we could contribute to cleaning up the beach, by picking up styrofoam, plastic, glass, basically anything man made. So my whole class decided we would do this as a large group and we all proceeded down the beach with the bags, chart, and gloves they gave us. At first we were goofing around a little bit but then we started to see a lot of trash in areas some would be decently clean and some just covered in trash. (We called the trash covered spots gold mines or jackpots.) So we ended up making it our duty to get the most tally marks for our charts to turn in. And all of a sudden everyone started yelling out things they were finding. Not one person didn’t participate; everyone was picking up trash and calling out what was found. After about 30 minutes I started writing down on the chart and at first we started very slow a couple of wrappers here and there but then a jackpot would come and the chart started filling up quickly. After about an hour or so we had found a plethora of hazardous materials toward the environment such as plastic rings, plastic pieces, glass, styrofoam, and a large amount of candy wrappers that was probably the most of something that we had found. Even though it was only 2 hours we were all pretty much exhausted and decided to walk back and we were quite a ways from where we initially started. And when we finally got back the teachers explained how much it helped, and if interested, we can volunteer to do it again. We ended up filling up around 3 to 4 bags which isn’t bad. And I have to say even though I missed football and sleep, that I'm glad I instead helped the environment, even if it was in a little way.
