Have you ever seen someone chuck garbage out their car window and wonder ‘Who's going to pick that up?’ An Ottawa man decided to stop wondering and start working. On this beautiful fall day, one would be hard-pressed to see a scrap of paper along a strip of pavement in Ottawa's southeast end. There is a reason why Johnston Road often appears free of litter. Majed Jadayel is that reason. He is a software engineer by day conscientious citizen by night. Jadayel spends hours on his bike, after work and weekends carefully picking up what other people carelessly toss out.
‘I can look at it every day or I can take a proactive approach and get involved in cleaning my community and where I live,’ he says.
Jadayel works the strip of Johnston Road from spring to fall; has done it for four years since he and his family moved to the neighborhood. Before that, he was cleaning up the community where he previously lived. Jadayel has even managed to spread the word when he and his family travel to the Middle East.
‘When we travel to the Middle East,’ says Cindy Jadayel, Majed’s wife, ‘we got our neighbors to do garbage pick-up in the area and we told them that we are Canadians, we take pride in our land, we pick up our garbage and we'd like you to do the same.’
Even while CTV was busy interviewing a passerby, Jadayel couldn’t resist the urge to pick up the litter he had seen near our car, humming while he worked.
‘I think it’s great,’ says resident Earl Whittal, ‘The more people pick up garbage and help out the community, the better it is. I do it myself once in a while. I stick garbage in my pockets, and once a see a garbage can, I throw it out.’
There are community clean up days in Ottawa, of course, but it doesn't take long before the area is littered with papers, pop cans and unfortunately liquor bottles.’
Sometimes I find over a 3 or 4 day period, the same kind of vodka bottle thrown on the side of the road, a personal size at almost the same spot. I have the same ‘repeat customer’ if you want to call it,’ he says, worried about someone driving intoxicated along that route.
The councillor for the area says the city commits a million dollars year to keeping the city clean but it can't do it alone.
‘There's a lot of geography in this city of Ottawa,’ says Diane Deans, ‘we have fifty-four hundred kilometres or road and about fifteen hundred kilometres of sidewalk. It would take a veritable army to clean that all up without the help of citizens.’
Jadayel admits he'd like some help sometimes but is encouraged by the positive comments from those who pass him by.
‘They honk their horns or give me the thumbs up,’ he says, ‘It just gives me that extra push to keep doing it.’
