In 2005, we heard about the Ocean Conservancy's 20th Annual International Coastal Cleanup Day and decided to participate. We made flyers, invitation letters, sign up sheets and had lengthy discussions with our community sheha and village elders. The evening before we were disappointed that not many people had shown interest to come and sign up. To our surprise, the next morning we had overwhelming support! The group photo was taken of the dive team which started earlier and we didn't get a photo of the large group of volunteers.

The turnout of people and rubbish collected far exceeded our expectations! One of our returning guests was looking at the pile of rubbish bags and commented, “This place is so clean I didn’t expect you to find anything.” I think that sums it up nicely – Kendwa is one of the most beautiful places in Zanzibar and with the environmental awareness of our community members and guests, we will be able to keep it this way! At the end of the event, one village elder personally thanked us expressing his gratitude and appreciation which inspires us to keep participating year after year.

As for our results, from our best estimates (not everyone put their names on our signup sheet), we had approximately 82 people participating in the cleanup! Nearly 75% of the people participating in the event were from the local community with the remainder being overseas holiday makers visiting Kendwa. It was wonderful to see the Kendwa villagers, businesses and guests united and working together for a common goal... we collected 108 bags of rubbish with a total weight of 729 kilograms!!

As part of our Annual Beach and Underwater Cleanup event in 2012, we undertook an additional project and sponsored the Greenhouse Recycling Centre to get their machine up and running! They had acquired the machine and could not find the funds to get electricity to the machine, therefore Scuba Do Zanzibar funded this initiatve to get it up and running for our cleanup event. We sorted out all of our plastics and had them broken down the following day!

This project was instrumental in giving a value to plastics such that people would no longer throw them all over the ground, we found quite the opposite. We approached hotels to ask them to "donate", rather then "sell" their plastic bottles to Greenhouse Recycling in the beginning to support the project. One hotel responded that they were saving their bottles to raise money to fund uniforms for their football team! With Greenhouse Recycling buying the plastics, we saw a HUGE improvement in plastic litter being cleaned up in the North of Unguja Island.

Scuba Do Zanzibar's donation of wheelbarrows, shovels, rakes and gloves to assist our environmental committee in cleaning up the public access areas. This rubbish, if left, will eventually end up on the beaches and in the ocean.