Hithadoo SOLV

Painting crew

Clean -swept street

Volunteers

       There is a massive,  mostly volunteer effort to clean up and spruce up Hithadoo before the SAARC Summit  on November 10-11.  All along the Link Road, the paved causeway that connects the western islands of Addu Atoll, I see groups of women clearing brush.   The brush is full of trash.  When I first spotted the women hacking away with hand tools, I wondered how they could make any headway against what looked like acres of jungle and trash.
      People here are fastidious about their houses. One of the first sounds I hear in the morning is sweeping.  Women sweep the dirt streets outside the walls of their houses free of dead leaves and sticks that might have accumulated during the night.

Roadside brush pile

     The vacant lots and roadsides are another story.  Those spaces are covered with trash, and  the piles of brush that the women rake up there  are laced with plastic.  Roadside piles are shoveled into dump trucks by volunteers and taken away to be burned.  Men in black, the local police force, walk around the fields setting fire to the piles.  
      Since 1971, Oregonians  have flocked to the coast twice a year to clean up our entire shoreline of public beaches.  Those efforts are organized by a group called  SOLV.  The cheerful workers   here remind me of SOLV crews.  In four weeks, the Hithadoo volunteers have cleared almost every space along the Link Road of brush and trash.  It looks great.