Los Angeles River Clean-Up (:

Heyy Everyone, My name is Siloneth Armas known better as Melissa and i am a current student at Cal State L.A. and i wanted to discuss a very fun time that i had when i went to clean the Los Angeles river.(: Cleaning the river wasn't exactly what i thought it was going to be, mind you that i am from San Diego and know nothing about what is in or around Los Angeles, nor in the area. When I was told at the beginning of the quarter not to make plans on May 18, 2013 because of an assignment we had to do I immediately giggled, and thought of a way to get out of it, because I knew that it was my Saturday being taken away and i wanted nothing to do with helping out the environment. But as the quarter was continuing i grew less and less ignorant toward this project. In all of my classes i was given assignments that made me realize what i was doing to this environment to harm it along with help it. As the weekend approached I still wasn't all that please about going but in a way was excited to see what i'd find, and be able to meet a new place in Los Angeles I had never knew even existed. The eve of the trip approached and I was getting anxious about how it was going to go, what i was going to find, how bad i was going to feel going, etc. There were so many questions running through my mind and i decided to just wait and see what happened. Finally, the day of the river clean up was here, and i woke up feeling better than ever. I was excited to see my classmates and teachers get together and do something good for our community, and environment. When my friend and I finally got there we saw that it was practically in the middle of houses and there were people still setting up, so we concluded we had arrived a bit early, haha. But after being debriefed and put in to groups we set off to clean the river. My group and I encountered many different peculiar things. One of my group mates found a cone inside the grassy area. We also found a cart that was inside of a tree, it seemed as though the tree had  formed itself around the cart, since it was there for such a long time and no one ever came back to remove it. An amazing thing about my group was the fact that none of us really knew each other outside of the classroom and because of this field trip we all got to know each other a lot more. We realized that we had a lot in common and cared about the earth. This field trip was an amazing experience for me. It changed my perspective on the earth and how humans are a great cause to what is occurring to our planet. And it made me more happier to clean because I got a cool T-Shirt out of it :D