Environmental Management Club

The Environmental Management Club had a number of goals to meet at the start of the year, 2018. Upping our involvement in environmental programmes around the school especially tree planting, raising awareness in environmental issues in our community through everyone’s involvement, expanding and consolidation of the apiculture project, helping to resuscitate the waste management project, getting Watershed College to participate in UN related environmental commemorations and conducting school-wide lectures on environmental issues.

 In the second term as per tradition, the club ran two campaigns: ‘Zero Litter Tolerance’ and ‘Every Drop Counts’ which involved the whole community in picking litter in and around the college as well as water usage management programme. We stuck up posters on environmental awareness and conservation. Both campaigns were a huge success. Additionally, we ran the green ribbon week at the school together with the green civvies day which saw us raising $270.00 towards purchase of beekeeping kit and consumables for other events in the third term.

Fudzai, Lindsey and Patrick were pivotal in poster making and publicity campaigns around the campus. Waraidzo drew up lists of team leaders from among club members for the schoolwide litter pick campaign. We covered the farm community, ADC, staff houses, main bus stop and cattle paddocks. The Environmental Day theme is ‘Beat Plastic Pollution’. If the smiles on the faces of the litter pickers were anything to go by, the students enjoyed the exercise. There being a cholera outbreak in the country at this time did not dissuade the community from such a worthy exercise. Gloves and litter pick wires were provided by the club to ensure everyone’s safety.

Towards the end of second term, the club received a generous donation from Nyaradzo Funeral Services through the Marondera Town Junior Council of close to 100 exotic tree seedlings towards our tree planting project. The junior mayor, Michelle, who was also the school’s head girl, 2017-18, was very outstanding in making this possible. We made plans, and have already started implementation, to plant these trees around the Shane Buckley rugby fields.

The third term proved to be the busiest term as we got involved in another schoolwide clean-up campaign and upped the tree planting exercise. We were invited as a school to participate in the Zuva Petroleum Schools Tree planting competition. The target is 1 million trees by 2020 and we are very much part of this exciting project. We received more than 260 tree seedlings towards this cause. 100 of these are indigenous fruit trees like baobab (miuyu), michechete, misosoti, mionde, mikute and mishavhi. The rest are exotic fruit trees which include citrus like orange, naartjie, lemon among others. We got a lot of guava trees in addition to avocados and litchis.  The majority of the exotic fruit trees had been planted by half-term break. The O’ Level garden staff under the supervision of Mr Mateo assisted with land preparation. The outgoing club president, Waraidzo and the junior mayor, Michelle, planted their own trees just before they left after their six years at the College.

On 20^th November the club mobilised the whole school to plant indigenous fruit trees just outside the campus in an area close to the sewage ponds not far away from the College head’s house. We did this in commemoration of the Nation Tree planting campaign which falls on the first Saturday of December every year to mark the start of the tree planting season. Seven holes were prepared by David Phiri and Dzingai from college farm. The head of the school, Mrs Benzon and Forestry Commission resource person, Mr Chiparange participated in the exercise which saw each stream, form 1 to 5, teachers and workers planting a tree representing their specific group. The head led the way by planting a fig tree (muonde) after imploring students to show more concern in environmental issues. She emphasised on the importance of trees especially indigenous tree species which must be cared for and not be replaced with the exotic ones for posterity. Mr Chiparange added to this by urging everyone to be more sensitive and caring when it comes to indigenous trees. He said that Watershed College was unique in this competition in that while everyone else was scrambling for exotic fruit trees which are easy and quick to give rewards we chose to go indigenous which is ‘a first’ in the entire province. Mr Mutonho planted a muonde tree on behalf of the Watershed College workers. Mr Nhananga represented teaching staff by planting a muuyu or baobab tree. Forms 1, 2, 3 and 5 were represented by Andy Nyambiya, Chloe Mutinhiri, Dean Chombo and Panganai respectively. Not long after the exercise, the Lord answered our prayers and it rained heavily on Saturday and Sunday on the same week we had planted our trees. There are still more trees to be planted but the tree planting season is indeed on and underway at Watershed College.