During the past few weeks, I have been working on an environmental project with other students.

Most of you would be aware of 23RD INTERNATIONAL CHILDREN'S PAINTING COMPETITION, a competition held by the United Nations. You can find more about this at https://tunza.eco-generation.org/tunzaChildrenConferenceView.jsp. To briefly explain, this event is a painting competition holding the theme of reducing food waste.

ABOUT THE COMPETITION

The International Children's Painting Competition on the Environment is organized every year by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the Japan-based Foundation for Global Peace and Environment (FGPE), Bayer and Nikon Corporation. It has been held since 1991 and has received more

than 3 million entries from children in over 150 countries.

THEME: FOOD WASTE

Subthemes: Save the Planet—Save Food, Wasting Food is Wasting the Planet

To help inspire you, please visit UNEP's Think.Eat.Save. Reduce Your Foodprint website: www.thinkeatsave.org

The organizers are inviting children all over the world to submit their paintings to the UNEP office in their regions.

-Information Copied From https://tunza.eco-generation.org/tunzaChildrenConferenceView.jsp

The friends from my region and I believed that this was a very effective and international competition. We wanted to use this opportunity to help promote environment conservation among young children. So, we created a community called HOPE (Helping Our Planet?s Environment, Helping Our Poverty End, Helping Our Peace Engagements..etc. topics)

A few weeks ago, I visited a multicultural center in which children from the age of about 7 to 15 attended. We briefly explained the competition to these children and assimilated people who wanted to participate.

Yet, many young children are unaware of the dangers of food waste and the harms of a damaged environment. So, we taught the participants about food waste and told them how and why the problem directly affects our society. Many were interested, and we encouraged them to draw pictures for the competition. I brainstormed with the children about ways of expressing saving the planet. This helped them to think creatively and sketch out plans of their own for the competition.

The children at the multicultural center were ambitious. One young girl claimed that she wanted to win the first prize. A few boys who didn?t want to come at first soon became interested after being engaged in a few activities. I was grateful to be able to provide them with guidelines for saving the environment.

After sketching out the ideas, the children were provided with a diversity of drawing tools to color with. In this way, they were able to choose from the wide range of tools and try out what was best for their pictures. One child used a brush and paint to color the dark, gloomy background of her painting that displayed the gloominess of food waste. Another used pastel colors to express softness. Yet another colored with crayons to portray the diversity of dishes, or food, on planet Earth.

All of the paintings were expressive. The most important process of all was being independent. The children depended on our guidelines, yet we led them to their own ideas. They drew and created their artwork by themselves, which leaves a stronger legacy of the project.

As a newly appointed ambassador, I want to thank everyone in Tunza wholeheartedly. This is my first report as an ambassador, and I hope that we will all be able to build a better future.