Fall 2012

Page 1

issue XII • Fall 2012

Take   a Look Around You by varlee sheriff

I

t really feels good to take a bit of time and observe things around you: the people living next door, the neighboring community, the new things in your environment and even the old ones. This is exactly what my experience was during my time on a guided tour with the environmentalist Mr. James Makor in July 2012. I learn and hear so much about Liberia; the many changes we have and continue to go through, and how beautiful and hopeful our environment is. When we went to visit the West Point Community, I had the chance to experience the health and living conditions there. The poor sanitary condition, the poor health and living condition made it clear to me that if nothing is done and done quickly, sooner or later the community and communities along our coast will be swept away by the sea. The sea is slowly eroding our coastline. We saw more evidence of this when we extended our tour to the Hotel Africa community and observed a similar situation. We saw that most of the villas used to house those who didn’t like it in the hotel have been swept away by the sea.

sea erosion is a gabion, which is a square-meter box of coated wires imbedded with a cloth-like plastic and rocks. It allows for the slowing of the flow of water through it. We were lucky enough to have a look at some gabions beneath a bridge we crossed on the way to Hotel Africa. We can easily contact those that did the work under that bridge for assistance in building new gabions. This will greatly affect our control of the sea erosion. Also, we had the chance on the second day of our tour to visit the Waste Management Site located on the Monrovia-Gbarnga highway in the Whein Town community. It is being operated by the Monrovia City Corporation (MCC). This site points us to the solution of proper waste management. Again, we will only need additional assistance to improve and increase the site and to build new ones. If we do so, we will have control over our waste, leading us to a safer environment for habitation. The implications of the environmental degradation that we saw is that people are gradually loosing their homes; the land is being eroded and if we don’t do anything to help stop this, the land we see around us today will be lost to the sea. This is devastating because we are seeing this happen, but are slow to act, and people would rather focus on themselves and what suits them, regardless of what that may mean to the community now and in the future. What we can do is to be sensitive to this, advocate for the environment, and provide practical teachings for the communities.

Another thing we observed was the problem of improper disposal of our wastes. All over our communities, the waste floats here and there. In the markets such as Red Light, Waterside, and Douala, there is no proper sanitation. Besides the markets, the garbage collection tanks are full, one of which I saw at the Parker Paint junction while heading to the waste management site in Whein Town community, and now a downtown west point is now the sea the garbage is being poured around them. People normally ignore these problems because they are not too vis- There are many such issues that we face daily. If we turn to these little probible and they are not causing immediate disasters, but they continuously lems that will cause us greater harm in the future if they are not paid attensignal warnings and are problems that need serious attention now before tion to now, figure out what we can do about them, and then begin doing they get worse. This was a great learning experience for me and I will be those things right away, I bet we will have a better story to tell soon. very happy to explore other sectors of our environment, the problems and what can be done to solve them. Varlee Sheriff is a Future Guardian of Peace with everyday gandhis, a graduate of Ricks Institute, and will be attending college in the United States. As I stated earlier, Liberia’s environment is very hopeful in that, with the above listed problems, the solutions are at hand. One possible solution for


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