Youth clean Abyan beach [Archives:2005/836/Local News]

On Thursday, April 14, forty eight students and staff from AMIDEAST Aden joined millions of youth around the world to participate in Global Youth Service Day* (GYSD). The students involved in Aden's GYSD event are students from the ACCESS English language micro-scholarship program, which provides one year of English language training to secondary school students, and the Youth Exchange and Studies (YES) program, a student exchange program for secondary school students from the Middle East and North Africa to study in one academic year in the United States. Both programs are funded through grants from the United States Department of State and the US Embassy.

The students who gathered in the morning, received their GYSD hats and plastic bags, and began collecting plastic bottles strewn across Abyan Beach on Aden Bay (Indian Ocean). The students began at the south end of the Abyan Corniche and picked up plastic bottles and other trash for 500 meters along the beach. Over that half kilometer, they collected 230 bags of trash. The bags weighed over one ton, and most of the bags contained plastics, which is one of the least biodegradable materials polluting the world's oceans today. Students concluded that they hoped that others will help keep Yemen's beaches clean. The students also expressed hope that people will begin to realize the importance of putting trash where it belongs, in order to protect Yemen's environment for the generations to come.
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