Healing a River...

The Sungai Pinang River is not much longer than the Penang Bridge from one end to the other and it runs right through the central part of the Island disecting Georgetown from what used to be considered areas out of the Georgetown City Limits in the old days. It was wide enough at the mouth and deep enough to allow large 'Tongkangs' or Chinese barges to load and offload goods such as coal, rice, rubber etc where they were taken to awaiting cargo ships in the channe, this too was in the days gone by. The whole area around the river delta was littered with large warehouses and "godowns' or Gudangs in Malay and there was all manner of sizes of boats and barges in the water that was both aesthetically a gem to behold for a young boy. The smells of spices from the flourmills close by, the smell of bales of rubber rubber being loaded onto barges, or coal of onions, potatoes filled the air and spin your head with imaginations of far off exotice lands and the desire to travel and discover them.
That was the SungainPinang I grew up with... today the stench is of a different kind, it evokes the stench of death and decay of pollution from God only knows what and the river is black most of the time, littered with all kinds of flotsams from plastice bottles to rubber mattresses. It is the the saddest sight to behold at times that it makes one feel like there is little hope for the Island that once upon a time it its glory days boasted of the purest drinking water from this same river at its source. A river that used to host all kinds of mangrove wild life from the crocodiles and monitor lizards to the myriads of brilliantly colorful mud crabs. all species of birds found in such an ecosystom whose prescence and voices held one's spirit close to mother nature with awe even as a child. This was in the old days and the old days was not more than forty yeats ago and by any standard this was not that long ago not even in one generations' lifeti