As you may have heard, World Ocean’s Day was last month and we received lots of stories and photos from our participants taking part in beach cleanups. One of those stories came from Yao Chieh “Jeff” Hu. Jeff told us all about the great experience he had with a few other CETUSA participants at a World Oceans Day beach cleanup at Aquarium of the Bay. This is what he had to say:
Since the jet lagged problem, I woke up at 4 in the early morning and decided to start off my journey of the day. The streets were silent. There’s no man chatting, bird chirping and wheel running. What I feel like real, is the pulse of my heart. And here I started off. It took me an hour or so to the beach. I arrived as the sun rose up, and the entire world woke up. Shin Nishimura and Taoda (Masa) Masahiro, another two interns from CETUSA, were nice Japanese guys, we tried our best to clean the entire beach up. Though the beach is not quite large, there were still a lot of trashes, plastics and cigarettes. In the end, there were 1,170 cigarettes collected. What the beach cleanup means for me, was the feeling of some contribution to the world and a decent sort of workout. We then went for the pier. We visited around the beach and piers, having great food in a well-known seafood restaurant BOUDIN and visiting the pier to watch quite a few busker shows. Next stop is the warship museum, where we ran into several retired WWII battle ships. Most of them had the introduction for tourists stating how many Japanese ships they destroyed during WWII. It suddenly occurred to me that the history is moving on the way. Even though there were so many conflicts between countries at that time, for now, people are free to travel around the world. That’s the peace. And what we live for, is to keep this. 🙂
Pictured above are Shin Nishimura (left) and Jeff Hu (right) along with some of the trash they found during the beach cleanup. Below is a picture of Jeff Hu (left) and Masahiro Taoda (right) riding one of San Francisco’s famous cable cars. Shin and Masahiro are both involved in business and finance programs while Jeff is a software engineer intern.
Do you have anything you’d like to share on the CETUSA blog? Send your stories and photos to your program administrator or to Kody at kody.linscott@cetusa.org.