Reflective Essay: Keep Midland Beautiful

I’ve always loved doing community service in the nature of going to an animal shelter or helping with the HEB Feast of Sharing, but every time I heard the words, “pick up trash” it always made me cringe. I’m a very clean person and when I think about it, it just grosses me out. So, when I heard we were going to be cleaning up McKellar Lake, I wasn’t very enthused. But, actually going with people I enjoyed being around, and seeing that there was a ton to do, I was glad that I could be of service.
A couple years ago, when I lived in Midland, TX, we had a thing called Keep Midland Beautiful that I would volunteer at. They would always assign my group to a place where it would take about 20 minutes to pick up, and then we could leave. So, my first impression of this was that it wouldn’t take the two hours assigned and we could leave in no time. I was wrong. I had filled up two trash bags within the first hour! And at the end, there was at least 50 trash bags that everyone else gathered up. That’s not even counting the pieces of Styrofoam or even the tires that were found. It was very surprising because I didn’t know one little area could get so dirty. But after I found out about the floods, and peoples trash from other towns were being put there it all made sense.
I went in with a negative mindset that it was just going to be disgusting, and gross …show more content…
Even though I almost fell on my face over 15 times and I had a few bug bites. There was still a lot of little trash that was missed and there’s always going to be new trash coming in. Also, I wouldn’t mind going to a new location to pick up trash with the same people that organized this clean up. They seemed to have a good plan on what they needed to bring. They had tons of trash bags and enough gloves so everyone could have a pair. They even brought jugs filled with water. Which I thought was really nice because they didn’t have to bring us water and it was a supper hot