My Urban Paradise Experience.

Service Learning

The first day of ENC1102 I was feeling pretty excited, I heard great things about the professor teaching the course and it seemed like the class would be pretty easy. Everything was fine that first day of class but then as we began to go through our syllabus Service Learning was brought up...

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Service learning can really be annoying sometimes !! Especially when its 25% of your grade. 💀

Our service learning consisted of two parts, our presentation of Hamilton in Hialeah and helping the Urban Paradise organization. I'll be getting into more detail about my experience with Urban Paradise on this post. So pretty much Urban Paradise Guild is an organization that wants to help Miami from being underwater in the near future, and they do this by reconstructing ecosystems that have been destroyed by invasive plants, animals, or just dumb people. 😡

Urban Paradise Guild Logo

So I signed up to do my service learning with Urban Paradise at the Arch Creek East Environmental Preserve. 

The work we had to do was pretty simple we just had to rip out this weed known as Florida snow, which is actually an invasive weed and can affect our environment.

It's actually pretty cute since it has these white or pinkish little flowers that give the appearance of snow on the ground. BUT ITS AN INVASIVE WEED HERE IN SOUTH FLORIDA!

After picking up buckets of this invasive weed we had to obviously get rid of it, and the best way to do it is throwing them into salt water as the salt water pretty much kills the plant and makes sure it seeds don't spread. Overall the day was pretty nice, its honestly great to just be around nature for a bit and disconnect from the world. The only thing I will complain about is the gardening gloves they gave us to do this smelled disgusting...I felt like I couldn't get the smell off my hands after a while.

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BUT ANYWAY, here are some more pictures :) ...

Heres Arianna under the shade relaxing
 with her sunglasses on.

 Me putting in some work lol

These were some pretty scary spiders we saw 

as we were picking up the weeds, shoutout 

to Arianna for taking these

cool pictures.

Finally, I would like to mention Sam Van Leer, the president and founder of this organization. I know many of us might not care about some of these things but they are of great importance and its honestly so awesome to see how people like Sam devote their time to this. He loves what he does and is very well educated on saving the environment. It's great to know we have people like him in the world. 

Thank you, Sam!

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