River in the old days
This morning I woke up with lots of question in my head. Most of the questions are starting with the word “Why” and “How”. Those questions come from my dream last night.
I was fishing in a beautiful and clean river. Maybe that was the nicest time of my fishing experience. The water is very clean like glass. I could see small fish and fresh-water shrimp swimming in the river. Some metalic blue coloured kingfisher fly quickly passing in front of me, then suddenly they dive to the water. They take small fish and shrimp. In the other part of the river, I saw five happy children swimming and playing in the water. Beside them, three women washing their clothes and fill up their water container for cooking.
But, those things are not real. I was asked to a women there for a name of this lovely river. She laughed at me when I asked that. “How come you don’t know the name of this river. It is the great Ciliwung river! I believe you are not from somewhere else. You are from this town right?” She explained that to me with a big smile and laugh.
I woke up with this confusion. Ciliwung is the name of one big river in my town Bogor. Since I started my live here, 19 years ago, I never seen Ciliwung as beautiful as in my dream. Ciliwung that I know is very dirty. The water is brown and smell bad. I never seen any shrimp can be found there. What I always find are only plastics and other garbage.
I completely aware that that was only a dream. Dream that people usually never believe it will be happened. But, that dream has given me lots of question. Why is Ciliwung became like this? Why nobody ever give any attention to the quality of this river? Why this “great river” (the way that Dutch people called when the Dutch governed in Bogor) become smelly, dirty and bad river? How can we back to the old time when the river was still in good condition? How about doing something to rehabilitate Ciliwung?
Do you ever have any thought on this?
Image was taken from this site
the point is nobody cares about our rivers … so, will you? or we just want to dream and do nothing?
thanks for commenting this with the very important question. For me this should not be only a dream. I’m planning to take my simple action to collect those garbage.
it`s cool idea to make how to make our environment to be health again as our dreamed. dream in conscious state become a reality, if we can do it in a little action how to make a beautiful river as we wont & as we dream.
please take a look`s the other side’s of our damaged river by developing house in bogor ; http://agungpsiko.blogspot.com/2009/01/sesak-nafas-sungai-bogor.html