32 Marine Ocean Clean Up

Today a group of twelve of us here at TRACC headed to another island within Tun Sakaran Marine Park, about thirty five minutes by boat, to participate in a big ocean clean up day organized by 32 Marine, an ocean conservation group. I thought that this would be a small event, but we arrived to find 400 other volunteers from 30 different organizations. The goal was to clean up as much trash from the ocean and beach while scuba diving and snorkeling. At the end of our dives they weighed each group’s trash to see who had collected the most. With our dives, TRACC managed to collect over 500 pounds of trash in the span of about three hours. We thought we had it in the bag until groups started clocking in with 600-700 pounds. Can’t win em all.

After our trash had been weighed we were ushered to a big tent for an award ceremony, some speeches, raffle drawings and lunch. Upon entering we were told lunch wasn’t for another hour, which just wasn’t going to cut it for us. We found a small snack stand down the beach where they were selling chips, sodas, and curry puffs, which are kind of like empanadas. There were three catering trays of curry puffs on the table, and our group bought two of the three trays. The girl working there was definitely appalled by this and we fit the stereotype of being the fat Americans who couldn’t wait forty more minutes for lunch and cleaned the snack stand out.

Once the award ceremony got started it became clear that this MC loved having a microphone in his hand. I couldn’t tell you what country this man was from because he spoke four of five languages throughout the whole thing, but in the most irrational way. Rather than translating each thing he said into each language, he would just switch languages mid sentence and never fully translate anything. He started by saying he would do most of the ceremony in English, but the only time he actually spoke in English was during transition phrases. He would say things like “okay and next up we have *rambles on in Malay*” or “and now also I want to *rambles on in Malay” and the. Every 20 minutes or so he would point out our group, clearly the only group of foreigners in the crowd, and yell “YES YES ARE YOU HAPPY?” into the mic at us. He seemed very focused on how much we were enjoying ourselves despite not being able to understand 11/12 of what was going on.

In total, the group of 400 volunteers collected almost 9000 pounds of trash at the event, which was amazing to see. It was really cool to be apart of this event and work with people from all over Malaysia who share the same passion for protecting our oceans.