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Written by 8020 teachers. Do not memorise it — take the structure and the way ideas are developed, then speak about your own life.
A couple of years ago a small group of us from the neighbourhood organised a clean-up of the canal that runs behind our block of flats, which had basically become a dumping ground for years — plastic bags, old furniture at one point, that kind of thing nobody wanted to deal with. It started almost by accident: a neighbour posted in our building's chat group complaining about the smell in summer, and within about a week that complaint had turned into an actual plan, with maybe fifteen of us — a real mix, university students, a couple of retirees, one family with young kids who came along mostly for the novelty of it — meeting on a Saturday morning with gloves and bin bags the local council had agreed to provide once we asked. We spent about four hours at it, sorting recyclable stuff from the rest, and honestly it was filthier work than any of us expected. What made it worth doing, beyond the obvious fact that the canal looked genuinely different by the end of the day, was watching people who'd lived next to each other for years without really speaking end up working side by side and actually talking. I think that's the part that stuck with me more than the environmental angle, if I'm honest — the canal will probably need doing again at some point, these things don't stay fixed forever, but that sense of the building suddenly feeling like a community rather than just a place people happened to live was harder to undo.