Stop Cursing and Light a Candle

 Picking Your Battles

Literally that's what we've done. Picked a battle, or, to be more precise, battled by picking .

We've started a litter picking group (see what I did there in the title?). 

So I mentioned that Penang has a problem with trash. This is not exclusive to Penang, but it is worse here than in other parts of Malaysia and much worse than in the UK, and it's not always great in the UK. 

We had done a couple of beach and other local litter picks over the past year or so (I'd been getting all grumpy old man about the amount of rubbish being left on the sea front and the links), either independently or as part of local groups, and I thought we should try something similar here.

It started small - very small. Just Nicola, Thomas and I, but we still cleared a 100 metre stretch of beach and collected two full bags of material that would otherwise have ended up in the oceans.

The next time we were joined by a neighbour early on a Sunday morning and did another stretch outside of a beachfront hotel. We were even able to leverage some support from the hotel staff to deal with the trash collected. We maaay have resorted to a little bit of guilt tripping and even some light blackmail (would that be greymail?) by showing them pictures we had taken of balloons and bottles of water that had their logo on it that we had found discarded on the beach - not great publicity (we pointed out). 

A Hompton bottle 'relaxing' on the beach outside of the Hompton Hotel - not a great look for the hotel in question. I'll be getting back to them about this at some point very soon...

An otherwise very nice part of the island spoiled by the litter. So we did what we could and asked the Hompton for help dealing with the four heavy duty bags we collected.

Next time we were joined by the entire family as we tackled a local litter pick, but didn't get very far as we found a stretch of nearby greenfield land that was heavily polluted with plastic and general waste and spent all of our time here. This was a turning point. 

Here's what we were dealing with - literally the contents of bins just discarded on some nearby land!

The results afterwards are much improved having removed 5 heavy duty bin bags of rubbish.

By this stage I had set up a WhatsApp group and a Facebook group. Next I added a Facebook page and an Instagram account linked to the page - check me out being all social media savvy and all that!

https://www.facebook.com/permaipickerspenang

The hope is that this will snowball. I've linked our page and group to another group on the island and to a beach clean group back at home. I'm hoping to leverage some of this connectivity to get some local businesses and other parties involved. It's a process that is hampered by the fact that there are no obvious ways to engage directly with the local authorities or even really work out who is responsible for waste management here - it's all a bit, well, Malaysian! Which is to say a touch on the chaotic side - it seems to function well in parts, less well in others and the systems are a little impenetrable.

The general point is if there's something you don't like about a situation, change it if you can. Being vexed about things beyond your control is natural, but where you can, make the change happen. This has given me a sense of control and hopefully is bringing about a positive impact in the immediate community. Yes it's small and ultimately it's a drop in the ocean, but what is an ocean if not a collection of lots of drops? 

(I know - proper wise the last bit!)

Until next time

Best wishes all

John