Bunaken National Park has attracted tourists, many tourists from all over the world. From 1975 when It was first discovered by several divers until now, the beauty of the marine park keeps shining. Not to exaggerate, but the National Park has hosted million of marine lives. Coral reefs, reef fishes, sea mammals and many more can easily be found on the national park. It covers a total area of 890.65 kilometer square. Wikipedia describes 97% of the area is marine habitat with only 3% of terrestrial that includes 5 island.
Alright, I think it is enough for the intro.
Let's go for main course.
As the national park from the start has had good reputation, it did not come without serious problem. The earliest problem encountered at this national park long, long time ago was ilegal fishing that utilized dynamit and coral stealing by some tourists. These problem was solved by the government with regulation of no dynamit fishing and strict supervision for tourism. Local people on the island, after getting more and more information about the importance of the national park for living, understood and took it for real and they begun to protect the coral reefs, the national park.
However as time goes, problem evolve from one simple thing to more complex things. Rubbish, trash, garbage or what ever that is being called has become a serious problem for the national park.
Operating tour brings Flowers Lane Vacation to face the real thing out there.
The year of 2014-2015 were time where we operated tour for International School students who came with In Touch With Nature Education. Schools such as Jakarta International School that later changed into Jakarta Intercultural School, International School of Kuala Lumpur, International School of Phnom Phen, Pasir Ridge International School and International School Riau did island activity such as beach cleaning, fencing turtle nest of the beach and many more. While these activities were performed as real action, the night before we had this field action, we talked and discussed how important and serious the waste management was for. Plastics, styrofoam, rubbers, cans and many inorganic things has poluted the water. They are very dangerous for the marine lives.
There was one occasion when one of our Indonesian group visited the national park. On the turtle point I saw a turtle was struggling with plastic on one of its legs. When snorkeling, sometimes we saw some turtle eat plastic. Maybe becauae it looked like swimming jelly fish.
The ecological talk and discussion simply awoke the interest of these students that the next day everybody was engaged on the beach cleaning. We also visited a recycling center on the island to learn how the plastic is being treated on this island.
THEN BRILLIANT IDEA POPPED OUT.
We should start from education. Educating students, wake their interest on protecting nature and marine, treat the waste properly and proportionally. We believe by talking and having discussions with students repeatingly, we can at least start cutting the chain of nature ignorance life style that is still glued tightly on locals' way of living.
We also want to have discussion with housewives on the village about the bad impact on throwing household rubbish into the river repeatingly and continuosly. Perhaps by doing this, we will see better nature with less and less rubbish.
We have been in touch with education department and some schools to place our program on their extracurriculum. The good thing is, some schools are waiting when the program will be started. Not good thing is, we don't have instrument such as boat to accomodate the program. Since the program involve visiting the national park to show what we have (such as the coral reef) and how bad the polution by rubbish, we need transportation such as boat. We are trying to ear some fund to buy a long boat.
Here is the study tour programme:
1. Invite student in a classroom as many as 30 students
2. Visit the national park and have discussion and ecological talk and then let them do some observation.
3. Ask them to write papers
4. Select one best
5. Publish it on local media and reward the writer.
We could only hope that by doing this, we could preseve the national park.
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