1. Melati and Isabel Wijsen: Our campaign to ban plastic bags in Bali

The Ted was talking about the two young girls who are living in Bali worked on sort of “environmental protection NGO” named “Bye Bye Plastic Bags”. Here I wrote the short summary. 

This Ted was quite surprise to me because of the two young girls. When they started to work on this, they were only 10 and 12 years old. They did have neither any clue how to do it or any plan, nor a fixed strategy, nor any hidden agendas, just the idea in front of them and a group of friends working with them. 

In Bali, people generate 680 m3 of plastic garbage a day. And those plastic bags ended up in their drains and then in their rivers and in oceans. 

Until 2015, they are working on this already three years to try to say no plastic bad on their home island. Of course it is not easy, especially for the kids. They went to the airport thinking to get the commercial manager of Bali airport’s authorization to collect signatures behind customs and immigrations, because the airport is the best place to get one million signatures to get the government of Bali on board. 

They even started a hunger strike in order to get the governor of Bali agree talk about how to stop plastic bags on Bali. Finally, they got the promise from governor of Bali. 

They learned a lot during this fantastic work:

NO 1: you cannot do it all by yourself.

NO 2: think outside the box.

NO 3: persistence

NO 4: you need champions at all level of society

They proved that the kid can do things, can make things happen, make different!!