Gone are the days when you and your best friend shared everything about your life. Whether you’re at fault or she is, mending a broken friendship is far from easy. If the relationship means a lot and you aren’t willing to simply throw it away, fixing it is possible. That’s what I have learned in the past months.

When I first moved to Florida, I felt so out of place. I had come from a small town and was so unsure of myself. Luckily, my husband and I moved into a friendly neighbourhood, and things became better.  

For many years, my neighbour across the street and I shared happy times. But then a misunderstanding occurred, and she quit speaking to me. I tried many times to speak to her about the issue and tell her how sorry I was that I had let her down. But she refused to take my phone calls and avoided me when I was outside.

During our conflict, my husband and I put our house up for sale. We weren’t leaving the neighbourhood because of a feeling of hurt; we were having twins and needed more room for our growing family.

Months later, I moved away without talking to her and putting an end to our misunderstanding. It always made me sad when I thought of how poorly it had ended. For many times I wished we had renewed our friendship. I just hated the feelings left from our unsolved conflict. It was like a scab(痂) that kept reopening and worsening with pain and upset.

About eight months after we moved, I decided to take a drive back into the old neighbourhood. As I drove down my street, I saw my former neighbour washing her car in her front yard. I knew that I needed to stop and greet her. I opened the car door and got out. To my surprise, she came up and gave me a big hug. We both apologized for our actions, and I felt that I finally achieved closure. I was able to say I was sorry and have it accepted.

I know exactly how you feel! I recently had a tough time working on a group project, too.

My teacher put me with three people (whom I’d like to call Cookie, Cupcake and Volcano). Our task was to pick a special place and make a brochure about it.

At our first meeting, Cupcake said, “Let’s pick Andaman and Nicobar! They have super-cute swimsuits (泳衣).”

“That is so true!” said Cookie. “Speaking of swimsuits, there are some get-ready-for-summer sales happening right now.”

“Really?” cried Cupcake excitedly.

I turned to Volcano. “Which place do you think we should pick?”

Volcano shrugged (耸肩) and said to me, “I don’t care. But what happened to your hair, Arizona?”

I was getting the impression that no one but me planned to work on the brochure.

When I came home after school, my mom could tell I was stressed out. “What’s going on?” she asked.

“No one else in my group is doing any work,” I told her. “So I decided that the only way to get the brochure done was for me to do it myself.”

“Well,” my mom said with a smile, “I doubt you’re responsible for everyone else’s part. Why don’t you talk to your teacher about it?”

When I talked to my teacher the next day, he suggested I talk with my group directly about my worries.

And at our next group meeting, I brought up my concerns in a friendly way. “Since we’re working as a team, we’re all depending on each other to do the best we can,” I said. “If anyone is having trouble, maybe we can talk about solutions (解决办法) together.”

Surprisingly, Cupcake, Cookie, and Volcano all ended up doing their share.

So, dear Overworked, the next time you’re stuck doing way more work than anyone else, I think you should: 1. Talk with your group in a friendly way; 2. Discuss your concerns with your teacher; 3. Do the best job you can on your part of the task.

When Alex Lin was 11 years old, he read an alarming article in the newspaper about e-waste. The article said that people were throwing away their e-waste in places it should never go. This was dangerous, the article said, because e-waste contains poisonous chemicals and metals like lead. These harmful substances (物质) can leak into the environment, getting into crops, animals, water supplies — and people.

Alex showed the article to a few of his classmates. They were worried too. But what could they do about this problem with e-waste? How would they even start? “The first thing we did,” Alex says, “was to learn more about the problem.” Alex and his friends spent several weeks gathering information about the chemicals in e-waste and their effects on humans. They learned how to dispose (处理) of e-waste properly and how it could be recycled. “Then,” he says, “we had to find out what the situation was in our town. So we sent out a survey.”

What they found shocked them: Of the people who answered the survey, only one in eight even knew what e-waste was, let alone how to properly dispose of it. Alex and his friends went into action. They advertised in the local newspaper and distributed notices to students, asking residents to bring their unwanted electronics to the school parking lot. The drive lasted two days, and they collected over 21,000 pounds of e-waste.

The next step was to set up an e-waste drop-off center for the town and to find a responsible company to recycle the waste. That was when Alex and his friends learned another scary fact about e-waste — some irresponsible recycling companies don’t break down the e-waste and dispose of it safely themselves. Instead, they ship it overseas to countries such as China and Nigeria, where local environmental laws are not applied. “We checked carefully online to make sure the company we chose didn’t do this,” Alex says.

Because of the work of people like Alex and his team, more and more people are getting the message about safe disposal of e-waste. As Alex says, “Today’s technology should not become tomorrow’s poisonous trash.”