Hello My Fellow Classmates of English 101, as some of you already know and for those that do not know my name is Brittany Fernandez and I am student of Professor Hernandez. In this blog post I am here to tell you about my life changing as well as eye opening experience that happened while cleaning up the Los Angeles River. On May 3rd 2014 myself, my classmates, and other students within CSULA spent our early morning / afternoon cleaning up the Los Angeles River. To be completely honest I thought I would not get that much out of this experience but I was wrong and in fact I loved it and I'm glad that I had this amazing opportunity. As an individual I just usually stick to recycling and not really paying attention to all the other harming objects that have been embedded within our environment. To begin my day at the Los Angeles River we were put into groups and told to basically find and pick up as much trash as you can; in which we would later take it to the truck that was taking it away from the river. My group started out as three and somehow turned into seven but regardless I loved my group and rather than looking at this field trip as a job we saw it as an adventure to help make our L.A. River clean and even greener than before. Throughout the day our group found many food and drink containers and plastic wrappers but what we were most astonished by was finding an area within the greenery of the river which resembled a home or as if someone had been living there in that particular section of river. Within the section that looked like a home we found lot's of wood, cloth material, a snow or warm body suit, and strangely a piece of baby equipment that looked as if it belonged to a jumper or rocker; we later found a suitcase and a storage container. At first I did not think that I was going to have to walk down that steep incline of the hill to get to actual river and when I figured out that I would have to I was afraid that I was going to fall but thanks to my group members Angela and Jenielee they held my hand until we all got to the bottom. Through out looking for trash I would say that even though most of the greenery of the river was a challenge at times to get through that it overall is truly and incredibly an amazing place to be and even wander around for a bit. In order to see the river one needs to pass and get through all of greenery but in the end the struggle is definitely worth the view. Throughout this experience I had came to realize that it was not that other individuals were intentionally putting all this trash in the river but it is the fact that they leave their trash and other objects that with the rain and storms it washes into our L.A. River creating harm to that particular environment. Towards the end of our experience my whole group and I volunteered to help sort out the trash that we and others had collected throughout the day and by us doing so I realized just how many different plastics there are as well as half of the trash are whole or ripped plastic bags that sadly were embedded into the trees from having been there so long. During the trash sorting my group and I found two credit cards one being an American Express Card and other being an actual debit card....we wanted to see if one of the cards still had money on it but we decided not to! Overall I am glad that I attended this filed trip oh and in fact Yareli and myself carpooled on our way there and back so I guess you can say that we tripled our experience by helping create less smog and gases in the air! Another thing is now that my group and I have bonded through that experience one can say that we became even better friends..I wouldn't trade my group for any other, they were or should I say we were AMAZING!