"Let's Do It, Romania!" 28 September 2013, Caracal

Today is a big day, because today it is the National Cleaning Day and I am happy  to say that I took part in it as a volunteer. I did not posted too often in this new blog, not only because of some very serious problems (which are not the subject of this post) but also, because I've been busy giving a hand in organiseing and monitoring this ecological event in the town of Caracal, Olt county.

Let's Do It Romania! is a national ecological movement and organisation which is part of the greater Let's Do It, World! and it aims to awake the consciousnesses of the people and to modelate the mentalities  into a greener and more elevated ones.

Every serious ecological organisation aims the same ideal, but each one of them has a different way to do so. In LDIR's case, we are organising one National Cleaning Day each year. Usually, that day is somewhere in autumn, but it can be in any other day of the year, like last year, when the event was in May.

In that day, idealist green-spirited people from all over the country are called to gather the litter that is scattered unaesthetically on the streets, in the woods or in the fields. The volunteers are collecting the littler selectively in order to recycle it. By doing this, they give an example to the others which are - still but, hopefully, not for long - impassive and insensible towards he problems of our planet.

Unfortunately, in the Romanian society, in the last two decades of young and chaotic Capitalism, an ill mentality has evolved - that it is a shameful and degrading thing to clean the country, the nature. Some people don't feel ashamed to throw a piece of paper or a plastic bag on the street, but they feel humiliated and angered if you ask them to pick up their litter and recycle it, or, at least, deposit it in a trash bin. The more we import the products and consumerist ideas from Western countries, the more we get superficial, insensible and arrogant.

Let's Do It, Romania! aims to hold this negative trend and to make people regain their old traditional concern about beauty, nature and the well-being of their human fellows. Regaining old values shows itself to be a tough thing to do, even if we are talking about things which were still vivid in the recent past - only one or two generations at most.

Giving to this old and not-very-organised and not-very-awared-of values a new fresh ecological direction, proves itself to be even harder. But it is something that one has to do because it is our only solution as a national society and global civilisation. I know it sounds like big words, but I strongly believe this is the deep truth, and I will sustain that truth even if I would be in the situation of been the only one in the world who sees and tells: "The emperor has no clothes!"

I have joined this organisation three years ago and this is already the third time when I participate in the eco-action and I feel somehow experienced in it. I may say that now I feel the relative calm and serenity that comes with the knowledge you gather from such complex experiences.

But I can still remember that first day when I participated in the eco-action! Everything was so new for me, so full of challenges! I was so nervous about I not being able to do things right, that something might go wrong. Being part in a such big project can be not only thrilling but often overwhelming, and making it to work is a big challenge that puts a big pressure to ones nerves. But at the end, the feeling of contentedness and joy is equally high. Being aware of the fact that you are part of a great thing, a big project with higher aims, something that goes beyond you, is like feeling a special magic working in your life. It symply cannot be accuratelly expressed in words.

OK, I'm done with philosophy. Is time for facts. Today, in Caracal most of the volunteers were students from seven schools and two other institutions. A total of 297 people - a good number considering the fact that the day started with a morning rain which was intending to ruin our event.

Thanks to the help of our local mairie of Caracal, I was able to take photos and videos with the volunteers from some of these schools, and it is in my intention to publish these materials on the internet on my Facebook profile and, also, on my eco-page called Activistul Verde. But, until then, I publish here, on this blog, several of the photos which are, in my opinion, among the most reprentative for our today's event.

Starting to recycle..

A beautiful happy smile of an eco-volunteer.

That is the story of today in told in a few photos... I will come again in the future with other informations on this subject. My blog is not only about Linux, you know? :-)