Thursday, October 28, 2004

FEATURE: Keeping Our School Clean



Originally uploaded by NIHS.
By Taichi NAGAO & Yasuo YUMOTO

Just imagine what our school would be like if we didn't have cleaners...

When you enter the building, you would see shoes everywhere and then you would have to walk on the sticky floor littered with cans, pet bottles and food wrappers. The trash bins would be overflowing. The bathroom mirrors would be dirty and you wouldn't be able to see your face and check your hair and there would be no toilet paper! We'd have cockroaches running around our classrooms during lesson time and after school too. Instead of being Nagoya Kokusai Senior and Junior High School, we would be known as Nagoya Cockroach Senior and Junior High School.

Without cleaners our school would be disgusting dump.

Fortunately our school is not like that at all because there are people who work hard to keep our school clean. But did you know that for the hundreds of students, teachers and office staff who use this building every day, there are only six cleaners. They clean the entire school, from top to bottom. It's a big job . Can you imagine it? Let's be honest, how many of us can manage to keep our own bedrooms clean? Or even our lockers?

The cleaners work from 6:15 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. everyday except Sunday. And they see things which we don't notice. They pick up our rubbish that we leave everywhere and have to go through the garbage to separate our trash into burnable and non-burnnable items because we are careless and we don't bother to look at the clearly labelled bins. Sometimes we throw things into the garbage that are not empty and the contents leak all over the floor. Some students spit chewing gum on the polished wooden floor and the cleaners have a hard time scrubbing it off. And there are people in the school who don't even flush the toilet after they have used it. Because of these things the cleaners have a very hard time.

This is beautiful, modern, spacious building belongs to all of us, it is our school. How hard is it for us to use a little extra energy to throw our rubbish into the bins, to make sure we separate the burnables from non-burnables, to flush after we use the toilets? Let's not take our school for granted.