A pictorial expedition on cleaning of the Few Lake, Nepal | Milaap

A pictorial expedition on cleaning of the Few Lake, Nepal

There are times when you feel like repeating a success story again and again, especially when it involves children. Similar is the feeling as I pen down the second half of the marathon of nurslings making bottle bricks in Nepal.

After a frenzied day in Laxmi Primary School, I was all ready to take my children from Child Welfare Education (CWE) at Pokhara, Nepal for a cleanup of the famous Fewa Lake. This lake today looks nothing like what the fables of my father’s stories would paint. Like every other nature’s beauty,  it has been slowly engulfed in the circle of litter and degradation as the influx of people increased over the past few years. With the petty desire of igniting this thought in my children that there is an option to choose other than throwing wrappers of chips and chocolates, there is fun in cleaning roads and it matters how one single person behaves in the community.  With the ever pirouetting minds of young ones, I have noticed that nothing works better than a reality check for them. Also by then, the children from Shyauli Bazar had already set such a high benchmark for me, I was uplifted to do something about the Lake.

The entire program was divided into two days where every child was given a pair of gloves for their safety, a bottle to stuff plastics into and a small stick to tighten it. With a loud cheer on the front gate of CWE, we matched ahead towards the lake. Honestly, handling 33 children all charged up with the idea of making the fastest bottle brick, things can definitely get out of hands. Frida, a dear friend from Germany was there to assist me all the way through and the journey was so much fun. You get to be children with children again, I for one take that effigy again and again.

While day one was all about the roadside adjacent to the lake, day 2 was more of cleaning the lake inside. In terms of statistics, we made 70 bottle bricks in two days and those are still placed carefully at the right-hand corner of the corridor. As my children often call me and say, “ Come back fast, we need to reach 500 bottle bricks and then have a toilet in the playground!” Perhaps the pictures will be able to do justice to what milestones these little children have achieved in one day. If you focus deep into their eyes you can almost see a sense of unknown concern, very naturally ushering in, something adults would require law and enforcement to bind them into.


A " Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" cheer!


No plastic shall go unnoticed


Quiet planning of where to look next


The youngsters being adequately guided


The completion of Day 1


Completion of Day 2


The individual efforts


The male strength in the right place!

 Shall we sing a song while we clean? Why not!


A final closing with heartfelt Chinese, home cooking!