The remarkable ‘Free the Beach” campaign, was held at
themost classic andcomplimenting
location of the Karachi Beach, by the Pakistan Community Services Organization
(P.C.S.O).
P.C.S.O is a
not-for-profit organization working to better the community in many different
aspects. It has a dedicated team and has big aims for the future of Pakistan.
Previously, P.C.S.O
had worked for natural disasters’ relief. In 2008, when the catastrophic
earthquakes struck the Northern areas of Pakistan, P.C.S.O donated two
fully-loaded trucks of grains, water, lentils and flour by taking them to the
affected areas themselves. Also, in 2010 when the floods struck and severely
damaged the Pakistan Community Services Org. reached the concerned areas with
four loaded trucks of relief goods.
This time Team
P.C.S.O decided to enlarge its base and not only work for seasonal disasters.
The “Free the Beach” drive was a truly unique community-orientated event aimed
at sweeping the negative attitude towards Pakistan away from one place, this
time, the beach.
The event was
rehearsed a day before in the “Boot-camp”. Mr. FaheemVohra, an aspiring trainer
and initiator of The (Gujarati) Youth Conference, actively trained the team of
Youth Facilitators and White-shirts. Diljeet Kumar, another young trainer,
moderated the event with great enthusiasm!
The event was also
supported and attended by numerous NGO’s as well as Syed AdeelKhurram of
Strings. This was followed by Mr. ArslanLarik’s(A well-known and widely
respected trainer) thought-provoking main talk about keeping the beach
litter-free, followed by a symbolic ten-minute beach clean-up. He went on
further to highlight the benefits of mud- such as in lowering anxiety levels
and depression. He also spoke about the general deficiency in Pakistan’spublic of‘not
having a problem with the problem itself’, especially when it comes to the ignored,
dirty public toilets and the safety of women when stepping outside their homes.
Sumrah Ahmed, another
inspiring personality, then spurred the youth into actionby challenging them to
find different discarded items, making a sand model to ‘clean the negativity
from inside Pakistan’, creatinga human tower and a man-made crescent and a star,
in teams. These activities were thoroughly enjoyed by all and they had the
youth actively participating in sweeping the negativity away from the beach, as
this was team PCSO’s target. Last, but not the least, the “youth Guru”,
ZainGoplani focused his interactive talk around “doing something to address
Pakistan’s basic problems ourselves rather than just leaving them to
theauthorities (as the audience responded), and using our resources, e.g.
teaching children for free.
Lubna, a medical
student, remarked that the crowd was very decent. This indeed rings true. The crowd
ranged from students to families and also different organizations and all of
them were attentive and positive. Thankfully, the event was carried out without
any disruption.
The Media Partners
for this event were KTN News, Metro 1, Daily Naibaat and Maheshwarz Studios.
The timings and
weather, throughout the event remained excellent and made it easy for us to
enjoy the campaign.We all began to think about Freeing
the Beach while sitting, standing, listening and watching the event unfold.
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