On May 3rd, 2017, my family and I set out to do a cleanup of Kealia “Sugar” Beach on the island of Maui, USA, North America, Earth. Having collected supplies from Colleen Foster, Director of Education at the Maui Ocean Center, we were all set and excited to go.

It was a long drive to get to Sugar Beach, and when we got there the property in front of it was so vast we didn’t know where to go. Finally we found a space to park and went through what we hoped was the entrance.

There were glass shards hiding in the sand, large, overgrown bushes on the sides that held large clumps of trash, and dead fish littering the shore. It also smelled kind of weird, but maybe that was just me. Sugar Beach was not an ideal beach to play in to say the least. But an ideal place to a cleanup.

Eventually my dad and I broke away from my sister and mom, and when we looked back they were out of sight. We kept on going. Then we hit a large body of water, blocking our path to the rest of the beach, but we got around it somehow. All the while we had been squeezing into large, thorny bushes with our impossibly large trash bags and attempting to use our pick-up sticks to get the trash. I never could get the pick-up stick to drop anything in the bag. But overall, the beach cleanup wasn’t too bad.

My mom and sister had stayed behind because they had found a spot where there was a ton of glass buried in the sand. They had left their pick up sticks on the ground near them and had found several bottles already. We joined in and finally had to go.

When we got back into the car, I waved goodbye to Sugar Beach and I thought it smiled back. It was probably from the fact that a lot of the trash disturbing it was now sitting in its rightful place: in trash bags in our trunk.