Take Out The Trash

The neighborhood kids are playing in the trash pile as their mothers sit and talk nearby.  This doesn’t seem to be a problem for anyone except me.  The kids, all of them barefoot, start to amass a small pile of items, giggling and shrieking at their treasures.  A crushed plastic soda bottle is tied to a discarded piece of string and dragged around the yard by one boy.  Two little girls turn single serving yogurt containers into baking pans for dirt pies and top them with bits of torn leaves.  Another small girl makes a pile consisting of two pieces of broken glass, torn cardboard, a twisted piece of metal and the application brush from a bottle of fingernail polish.  She squats in front of her treasures and looks contentedly at her collection.

I’m not sure what to say or think about the garbage here.   The streets are littered with refuse.  Sometimes the garbage is shoveled onto a truck, taken away and dumped elsewhere.  But the streets are never cleared completely or cleaned.  Rats dart in and out of the piles of trash.  There aren’t many options, this I know.  There is no money for garbage cans, or people to empty them.  And, maybe there is no place to dump all of this refuse.  I am not sure. 

But I puzzle as to why people wouldn’t see the need, or have the desire, to keep their immediate surroundings free of garbage.  I wonder how it is that they don’t see the link between sickness and germs, or at the very least, getting cuts and scrapes from castoff glass, tin cans and wire.  So many diseases stem from contaminated water and refuse.  And, for people who literally live of the land, how is it that they continue to pollute their terrain?  It seems difficult to believe it was always like this.  When and how did it change? Are there really no solutions?

I was lamenting to a friend about some of my challenges living here.  Lack of privacy being top of the list.  The ultimate form of this is that the kids go through the trash from my pit latrine.  Used toilet paper litters the yard like snowflakes after they have searched through the bag hoping to find something of interest.  My friend asked why I simply didn’t leave the bag inside the locked pit latrine until my landlord burned the garbage pile. 

It sounds so simple, and should be, but it isn’t.  The trash is never burned at a particular time so at some point, I must empty the garbage.   I can tell the children why they shouldn’t play with garbage, particularly from the bathroom.  But for kids whose entire day is making their own fun from whatever resources they can, educational lectures can’t compete.  And, I think it is like this with most situations.  Straightforward and simple often doesn’t seem able to work here.  Culture, daily routines, lack of money and resources and a myriad of other complex and layered issues block any seemingly straightforward solutions.

There are so many non-governmental organizations in Africa working on the fight against HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis malnutrition and general health.  Other agencies direct their focus and energies on much needed water resources.  And, still other groups teach English and general education.  So, when all of these agencies reach their goals and we have healthier and literate people, with accessible water, where will these people live?  In the landfills that have now become their homelands?

The little kids continue to play.  Amadou usually races around the yard with a bicycle tire, keeping it rolling with a stick or with a skilled flick of his wrist.  Today, though, they have found a tire from a car, tossed on the side of the road.  Balloons, actually condoms, tied to a string, are the biggest excitement for today.  The discarded packets are strewn about the yard. The kids are covered in dust and dirt, their black skin now ashen grey, they look like small ghouls running about.  I can’t help but to see this as foreshadowing of the disease and early death they will undoubtedly face.