My Pledge To Mother Earth
Everyone has a pledge to someone else. A pledge is defined as a solemn promise that we give to somebody else or sometimes, to ourselves. When we pledge to do something we often have the urge to fulfill it. As a student, my pledge to my parents is that I will study hard and be successful in the future. However, I would like to ask everyone out there, “Do you have a pledge to our mother nature?”
As human, we have been taking a lot from our world and all of our activities boil down to pollutions, acid rain, green house effect, and a long list of man-made disasters. We never wonder how the smoke we emitted “choked” our atmosphere, how the sewage, oil spillage and toxic poison flow through the “arteries” of the earth. As I look back at how human carry out this “environment assassination”, I feel very guilty of myself, because I knew that what human is doing now is wrong because there is a saying,” evil triumph when good men do nothing”. I feel that after equipping myself with wide knowledge about the environment and not doing anything about it is a waste of the wisdom that is educated in me. Hence, I will stand up and give my pledge to the environment so that a better and a greener world for all of us can be realized.
My very first pledge to mother nature is very simple. I will always make sure that I will never litter anyway I like. Everyone knows that littering is indeed a very bad habit but honestly, sometimes we do throw it anyway we like before giving a second thought. This act may look natural for some of us,but guess what? Aluminium cans take at least half a century to decompose completely if they are not recycled. Polymers like polyethene will never decompose due to their complex molecular structure. If we do not throw them into the proper place they belong (the thrash can), these substances will bring great harm to our environment. Drains will be clogged, chemicals in the trash will poison the plant and our vital water sources. The accumulation of rubbish will bring a lot of disease-carrying vectors like mosquito and house fly. I have decided, I will never litter even until I am in my death bed.
My next pledge to the environment is that I will always practise recycling. When I was young , I kept wondering why my parents always collect and stack up the newspaper in the storeroom. I later found out that through recycling these newspapers, we are actually helping the authorities to reduce logging. It is true that trees are needed to make paper but we are not told that to get certain trees, a lot of younger trees are cut down to make way for the heavy machineries . Hence, recycling is the best way to make sure that the resources we have will not be wasted. In this way, the consumption of energy can be reduced. Here is the reason, recycling a used aluminium can instead of extracting it from the soil can cut down the energy used by 90%.
My final pledge is that I am determine to make sure that the future generations are going to carry the call to make a greener world. I promise that I will educate my children to treasure what they have. I realized that the effort of helping our Earth is not enough in just one generation. We must bring forth the strength of all nations because only with the unity of every community, we can fight the adverse effect of our own doing. There is a saying “unity is strength”. As I educate my children to love green, they will one day spearhead the effort of saving mother nature.
Saving our biosphere is a constant effort that we must put into. However, now is the critical time for us to put in more effort because a stitch in time saves nine. On the other hand, if we are just being ignorant and keep up with our ‘good’ effort of making our world sick, the time will come when all our last effort to help her will be like flogging a dead horse.
So, what is your pledge to mother earth today?

Selwyn Jong 5 Alpha 2010

Second Assignment: The Spring Festival

In every corners of our world , celebrations and festivals are a common part of our life. We have festivals, ceremonies and celebrations to commemorate some big events in our life (or in the lifes of our forefathers). We also celebrate to remember our endeavours and efforts in facing hardship. We,too celebrate for our future success. All in all, we celebrate festivals mainly for our own pleasures and desire, besides breaking the daily routine of our life.

As a Chinese living in Malaysia, it is indeed the time of the year for me. Same goes to the other Chinese as well. It is during this time of the year that my whole family is able to gather together and and have a long list of exciting activities. This includes having a Reunion Dinner during the eve of Chinese New Year. The night before the new year, all the family members will gather and and have a great feast which includes more than 5 dishes . The dishes must not leave out fish, chickens and ducks. These dishes symbolise the properity that had been enjoyed by the whole family throughout the year and the better years ahead.

Besides the younger generations will recieve "ang pau" from the older ones. The giving and recieving of the "ang pau" depend on the status of an individual. If that individual is married even at a very young age, "ang pau" must also be given to the children. On the other hand, the elderly are not expected to give any "ang pau" but recieve it from their sons and daughters.

The next event will be visiting my friends and relatives. This is mostly done on the first 5 day of the new year celebration. Besides there common practices like Lion Dances and playing firecrackers are still very popular practices in Kuching.
Other events like ancestral worship are practices that are being forgotten. Most Chinese here are Buddhist or Christian and this practiceis already not common.

Another country that celebrate Chinese New Year is the United Kingdom. The celebration there is as vigorious as in Kuching. The Chinatown will be specially decorated and there are cultural stalls, food and lion dance displays. Shaftesbury Avenue will become 'Hong Kong in London Chinatown' with a stage featuring performances by local Chinese artists. The official opening ceremony is at 12 noon in Trafalgar Square. This is followed by performances by artists from the Qinghai and Kunming provinces in China, as well as Chinese dragons, lions and Chinese acrobatics. It all ends back in Trafalgar Square with a firework display. The atmosphere is only filled with a mild air of the celebration but the celebration onlyu lasted for a day where asa in Kuching, it lasted for 15 days. However it is enough to remind the residents there that the Spring Festival is in the air.

So, that's how I created my first own blog. My teacher, Madam Flowrese will always be synonymous to blogging for me. However, we were not allowed to use this blog for other purposes. Instead, we could only use it to publish our schoolwork. As a student, I have to admit that English is a very hard subject for me to master. My skills are poor and my confidence in this subject had been long gone. However, broken pieces of interest for this subject still lurked in my soul. I need a "potter " who can mould my skills and make me into a person who can express my thoughts and feelings in a better language and I think the person's name starts with a 'F'.

My teacher and my blog

This is my very first blog and I am blogging now not because of my own will, but it is due to my English teacher's decision. Even though this does not sound fair to her, but I need to spit it out. Initially, I felt very awful about her idea. Computer skills are not my forte and I felt very confused about being in front of the computer and publishing what we feel to the world. However, she insisted that her will must be fulfilled. Most of my friends felt that it is a very good idea, in the sense that they were able to make good use of this opportunity to have a good chat with their friends. I, however distasted the whole idea. There were a few factors that led to this conclusion of mine:

First of all, it was due to the poor computer system of the school. The internet connection there was extremely slow. The system caused us more time to create our own blog than we expected. Even though we spent almost a whole morning in the computer lab, not much was done. The system was comparable to a snail! Fortunately we were not stupid and kept complaining about the system. We took our sweet time chatting away.

I know that my English teacher has a good intention for all of us. According to her, our essay will improve just by typing a few rows of common words into our blog. She added that blogging will definitely make us more aware of our grammar, vocabularies and other bits and pieces of English. To me, she is really a very good teacher. She shows her compassion to us through her little actions. I feel very thankful about having such a teacher but time will tell whether her actions will be fruitful.

For me, I will not let her good intention down. Striving forward in these years of education is the key to success for me.