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| With the Admin team of Alegria Palms Dos |
April 9, 2016, Cordova, Cebu --- We left early for the Municipality of Cordova, Cebu to meet up with the Admin Team of Primary's project in the north of Cebu: Alegria Palms Dos. We have been anticipating this day, the first initiative of our corporate social responsibility program, with our Foundation as main collaborator.
Representing SKILLS with me were Mayline and Engr. Teddy Taray. Ma'am Tess, our Executive Director, couldn't come because of a prior commitment. So we took on the responsibility to give the Alegria team all the support they need. We were happy that this has finally pushed through after an apprehension that arose earlier in the planning stage regarding the best date to schedule it.
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Our volunteers from Alegria Palms Dos,
getting all the trash they can get their hands on |
April 9 is the National Day of Valor (Araw ng Kagitingan) in the country. Being a holiday, people were really expected to troop to the tourist spots, and what better tourist spots to go to this summer than Cebu's beaches? There we were, witnessing loads and loads of pump boats transporting tourists, mostly coming from big families, gathering at the Roro Port where our coastal clean-up will take place. Mayline even met former trainees who were there with their barkada. We first had to assemble at the port and organized ourselves for the clean-up which took place for a little more than an hour.
Alegria was prepared with garbage cans, sacks and metal trash pickers. I wasn't expecting such a huge area where trash was unbelievably abundant! A part of the beach and a huge area where there are big boulders were the places we actually cleaned. On the side, we did some marketing campaign for our tech-voc programs among those in the port terminal and nearby local stores.
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| Cordova's Roro Port after the coastal clean-up |
All in all, this activity was enriching for us. We yet have to give feedback to the municipal officials on the measures that can be done to make tourists refrain from polluting the port's surroundings with plastic trash. As always, we need to go through a deep and patient work of educating our people. I guess we need to somehow live with resistance and hard-headedness, until people get and see the right direction to go.
More power to the Municipality of Cordova, Cebu! More power to Alegria Palms Dos!
