Envirofest 2009 a welcome success

May 24, 2009

With several thousand visitors at the Envirofest 2009 this weekend, it’s apparent that the heartlands is the place to be for educational outreach work! Many kids and adults walked away learning about corals and reefs and why they are important to our environment.

Interesting questions that arose were: What’s a snapper? What are sponges? Are corals plants? Is there anything to see at Pulau Hantu? How do we get there? Why are all [the marine groups] doing different projects instead of working on the same project?…

All very interesting and good questions, and they were all fed with good answers! Visitors walked away enlightened and some of them even walked away with free trips to Pulau Hantu and other islands of interest around Singapore in a bid to learn more about our natural heritage!

It was tough to work alone at the booth but thankfully, volunteers form Naked Hermit Crabs and Team Seagrass were ever kind to lend some of their time to assist me when the crowds began to throng in! Thanks to Lay Kun and Anu (NHC), Dinesh (Team Seagrass), Chay Hoon and Jimmy for helping out! We also shared resources – everything form scissors to velcro, drinks to pencils and even FANS! Yes, the heat at the event was extraordinary and it was affecting the attention span of both volunteers and visitors to the booths! So the fans were a very welcome addition to our booths!

Thanks also to Wenhua for her tenacity! Without which this event wouldn’t have happened! The National Junior College students did a great job keeping everything organised and getting all the groups comfortably in place, and more importantly for working so hard with the endless crowds that kept coming in to check out the booths!

A lady who came by the Hantu Blog booth shared that she was exceptionally “proud of today’s youths” and that she was “inspired by the hard work of the volunteers who despite their busy schedules make time for their passion and good work”. Comments like these make the effort and exhaustion all worth while! See you at next years Envirofest then!

Posted in Events