Russian foreigners try to keep Samui clean with help from Thai children

After members of the adult Russian community cleaned up abusive graffiti from around the island, (see story here) two young members of the community Milena and Alexander decided to clean one of Samui’s beaches.

They asked everyone who had a little time to spare to meet at Maenam beach and proceeded clean it with some people from the community. Below is a brief interview with Milena

What is behind your reason for doing this today? Why did you want to clean the beach?

Hey! The idea of cleaning the beach was in my head when I was there. We are living near this beach and all the time we see lot of garbage, plastic bottles, cigarettes and other debris. Some of this has been washed up from the sea, but more of this is the result of irresponsible attitude to Samui island, to Samui’s nature. I don’t know why people doing this every day.
I ask people in Russian language community on vkontakte (Russian version of Facebook) to help us with cleaning the beach. It was very great pleasure to see that about 15 people come to help us. There were people from Russia and the Ukraine!
After two hours of cleaning the beach there was 15 big bags full of garbage! We took all of on our motorbikes to the nearest Garbage collection point.
The reason is simple – we try to explain to the people that nature is around us, that this island, all of this is a home for lot of people who live here. Just ask yourself – do you want to live among garbage, do you want to swim among garbage, do you want that your children will play with the garbage, do you want that your lovely pet to hurt himself on garbage? That’s why we are doing this. We try to keep the place where we live clean. We try to keep Samui clean 🙂

I heard that Thai people helped you to clean the beach, is that true?)

Yeah! When we started to clean the beach the first helpers we got were great and cute Thai kids. They saw us and start to help collecting the garbage and putting it into bags! We continued clean the beach and saw Thai men that stand on the beach and smoking. We ask them not to drop the cigarettes on the beach and they decided to start help us with collecting the garbage and putting it in bags! That was unexpectedly and awesome! And no matter that it was language barrier, we all did a great thing together! 🙂

Is this your first time when you cleaned the beach or maybe you do anything else for Samui?

This is not our first time, but this time it was massive cleaning and it’s great. On Samui we are organising a clothes and toys collection for low-income families. We have asked people in the Russian language communities in our social network to help with clothes and toys. Lots of people throw away or selling their clothes and toys, but someone cannot buy them and we try to take care about them a little. And it was pleasure and pride for the Russian language community when they started to call us and started to give us clothes and other things for low-income families.
And the biggest pleasure is to see the eyes of the children when we come to them and give them toys.

Be smart, do the best for this world and #keepsamuiclean

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