Back to School and Cleaning project

It's Saturday night, the end of a very slow day. I can't believe it's school time again. I woke up pretty late today and really felt like doing nothing. I will admit that I spent the whole day in front of the stupid computer but I fixed some things and organized the huge mess on my desktop. I also did some more research about U of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne where I already received an offer for a Ph.D. in Materials Chemistry. The program looks very strong, some of the research is just yummy and the financial offer is pretty good. I am really excited and so ready to move on, whether it will be Illinois, South Carolina, MIT or whatever. At this point I keep all options open.

Today I also received a call from Dr. Myrick, my mentor from South Carolina. He invited me for an official visit, so I will probably fly to Columbia, SC on the 18th of Februrary. I also e-mailed Illinois for a tentative visit schedule. Although I love travelling, I hope I won't get too many offers because I won't get anything done this semester. I am not looking forward to writing my senior thesis, but no matter how much I complain and how busy I will be, all I know is that my thesis needs to get done.

Before I decided to write this journal blurb I had so many things in my mind, but now I am blank, so I will go ahead and talk about the cleaning up project that I did in Romania.

The pictures down below are pretty explanatory. One of the first shocks I had after arriving home was the disgusting view out the kitchen window. The area around the trash dump looked more like a landfill than a backyard. Thanks to negligent people who don't care to put the trash in the dump, stray dogs who pull it out in search for food, strong winds, and negligent trash collectors the zone was a disaster. I couldn't just stand and do nothing so I wrote a letter to all the people living in my apartment block. I simply described the situation and asked everybody who cares to come down on Saturday at 12:00 pm and pick up some trash. I distributed 80 copies of my letter to the people that are immediately affected (visually and olfactory) by the mess.I figured that if out of around 160 people who read the letter at least 30 people came down and picked up trash for 5 minutes the whole area would have become spotless. You should know that in Romania implication and resposability are unknown and any sense of community is totally absent . That's why my effort was more of a sociological experiment than truly a cleaning project.

It turns out that Saturday at 12:00 sharp 10 people came out (including me, my brother and my mom). There were a couple of little kids, some guys in their fifties and an older man. We all worked for 40 minutes and filled up more than 22 giant trashbags. The improvement is quite visible in the pictures. Although a lot of people were looking out the window probably thinking "what do these freaks want?" I was really glad that we managed to get the job done. I finished my little project by writing another letter and distributing it to the same 80 mailboxes. I presented the outcome of the project and a few pieces of advice for keeping the area clean. I also e-mailed the trash company, the mayor and the press. The next day the trash company replied and appreciated my project and the newspaper had an article about it. It seems like really simple problems like keeping the backyard clean are very hard to solve in Romania because no one has any kind of initiative. I assume that my project was a surprise for many of the people, but it was an even bigger surprise for me that so few responded.