Children and the environment

In a number of Dar es Salaam schools and many schools around the country, the lack of cleanliness is a major feature that nobody can miss. While some schools in rural areas can be excused because their very infrastructure is made up of mud and bricks due to extreme poverty, this excuse does not apply to the majority of schools in the country.

While there are exceptions, it is disturbing to see children wearing dirty school uniforms and littering the city’s streets with items they buy from street hawkers. Why do schools not educate children to abstain from street vendors who often sell unhygienic food and drinks and why do school boards not develop a sense of good dressing and clean environment on school premises?  

When attending a graduation ceremony at one city school, I was amazed when a teacher who was called on stage to be awarded an appreciation certificate, wore casual slippers to receive his award. Such casual dressing ultimately reflects on school management because no serious management would allow such an appalling dress sense to prevail among its academic staff.

Schools need to keep their surroundings clean and children should be made more aware of preserving the environment beginning from having zero garbage being dumped to taking care of the surroundings around them. They should know about recycling of paper, discouraging tree-felling, nurturing trees, protecting greenery and also about the harmful effects of materials like plastic and polythene bags on nature.

To encourage environmental concern among students, schools should consider forming environmental awareness groups through which conscious children are allowed to address environmental issues in their schools and the cities they live in. Such groups can be encouraged to leave no stone unturned for cleaner and greener school premises and can even be encouraged to write about, suggest or actually be part of an off-school team to make the city less polluted, clean and healthy to stay in.

Nature is beautiful but in the name of science and development, human beings are destroying its beauty without considering that what they are doing is threatening our very existence. If school students clean their own house and go about educating people about the benefits of nature conservation this would greatly promote environmental awareness. Voluntary student groups can be made to interact with interested kids of slums and villages and for programmes to be more coherent it would appear that the best way forward would be for the Ministry of Education to call upon all major schools to form vuluntary Environmental Groups within a certain time frame. Following this announcement, groups from different schools can get together to share notes and seek further progress in environmental awareness.

“Nothing can be more beautiful than a place with lots of flowers and trees to provide us with the required shade on a hot day. Why do you think we require AC and coolers now and our ancestors lived without them?” asked one 12 year-old student in Standard VIII when asked about the need to curb pollution.  He concluded saying, “that’s because there was no pollution then and as a result, no global warming. With the advancement in science, we hardly get to see some of the old beautiful creatures now. With the diminishing forests, they are also going into extinction.” When young children know about nature and the atrocities heaped upon them, they can encourage elders and philanthropic groups or even international aid groups to lend in a helping hand.

In Dar es Salaam, where does one go to be close to Mother Earth? Some would say that stretches of the coastal line still provide untouched land but within the city there are few areas where one can stay away from pollution. The area around the National Museum with it’s impressive and beautiful line of trees and the nearby botanical garden do provide a rare break from the city’s noisy monotony and the Mnazi Mmoja gardens, though small, provides an inkling of greenery in the city. Some of the other designated open spaces in and out of the city have been invaded but should not the city authorities reclaim these for a better long-term purpose? There are so many similar issues to tackle and though it is known that changes will take time, awareness programmes from grass-root level will help create a society that becomes more irritant when common wrongs are done.

Car smoke, acid rain, deforestation, depletion of the ozone layer, water pollution due to domestic animals being bathed in river waters and washing of clothes and other things in rivers are some of the burning issues at hand. Similarly land degradation has negated many advances made by increased productivity, air pollution is at a crisis point due to traffic congestions, marine fisheries have been over exploited while numerous plant and animal species and extensive stretches of coral reefs will be lost forever.

There is a saying, “Little drops of water and few grains of sand make the mighty ocean and the pleasant land.” In the same vein, any small effort made towards conservation would go a long way towards making our planet a better place to live in. Here children have a role to play so that unlike their uneducated parents, they do not continue to manhandle nature.