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Serving the Community at Tian Yuan Temple

Date 2012-03-19 4910 Clicks

When most Taiwanese think of cherry blossoms, the first place that usually comes to mind is Japan, followed – possibly – by Mt. Ali in Central Taiwan. Yet in the last few years, a new spot for viewing ‘sakura’ (that now draws bus-loads of tourists at a time) has emerged.

Located less than twenty minutes from the Tamsui Campus, the spot is home to Tian Yuan Temple, a large six-storey temple surrounded by dozens of delicate, light-pink sakura. On weekends, visitors flock in their thousands to Tian Yuan Temple to get a glimpse of the beautiful trees. The inevitable result, however, is traffic jams and paths with scattered trash.

This year, TKU teamed up with volunteers at Tian Yuan Temple to help “clean up the trash”. As part of their prerequisite service learning program, freshmen from the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering sacrificed part of their weekend to help maintain the cleanliness of the local Tamsui environment. Before beginning the task, students were issued with volunteer vests, hats, raincoats, special tongs for picking up garbage and garbage bags.

One of the participating students, Shen You-de, commented: “doing a whole day of volunteering work is really tiring. The most common types of litter included cigarette butts and half-eaten food with forks sticking out. People that litter really don’t have a sense of social consciousness”. On the other hand, there were some positive stories to come from the experience. “When one group of tourists heard that we were spending our weekend to serve as volunteers, they specially brought over fruit for us to eat”, You-de recalled.

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