Brooms, bags and gloves in hand Scouts Fenix 11 headed out to give our local  park a much-needed clean-up, there was just one thing we hadn't quite planned for, the wind! As we made our way along the path, we soon discovered that picking up litter in windy weather can bring some funny and sometimes frustrating situations, just when you thought you had collected something, the wind took the rubbish right back out of your bag again. We should have known that this area suffers a lot from wind as the majority of rubbish was actually plastic bags, food wrappings that had blown onto the fences and become trapped. Unlike my original assumption that the scouts would not enthusiastically participate in an activity that is not necessarily the most exciting, they were stretching their arms as far as possible to reach rubbish on the other side of the fence and found it hard to accept when they had to leave an unretrievable bit. They proved me wrong and made me very proud. As the park was so long, we came up with a practical plan. We left our filled rubbish bags alongside the path as we progressed, then collected them all on our way back. This meant we could cover the whole area without having to carry every bag with us for the entire journey. Although one stubborn scout who wanted to fill up his own bag to the maximum learned that dragging a bag may seem like a solution until the contents become a trail behind you when the bag rips. It was a good chance to show the children that dropped litter doesn’t stay where it is dropped. The majority here had arrived by the wind and if it had not been trapped by the fence would have ended up in the river.