Its all Over

"People say I'm extravagant because I want to be surrounded by beauty. But tell me, who wants to be surrounded by garbage?"
Imelda Marcos

Its a way of life, entire jobs and careers are centered around it, its mushy and smelly and Oscar the Grouch Loves it. The Sesame Street Reference may have given it away but if you visit a slum and fail to mention garbage- you probably weren't at a real slum. We are so used to our regimented weekly garbage routine where we lay our garbage and recycling out at the manicured curbside and trucks with drivers come and bring our trash to managed dumps where we sort out the different household waste, plastics, newspapers, paint and other toxic materials.

Life on the other side of the world is very different. Who cares about public garbage cans when you can just throw away your trash right next to the fruit stand that sells pineapples? Our neighbourhood is a collection of apartment buildings and absolutely none of them have garbage collections places. According to some of the other residents, approximately 20 000 people live in the same collection of apartments as we do. The garbage will continue to pile up. Residents will keep garbage on apartment balconies and wait for a group of garbage collectors to carry it down from each balcony and dump it into a central location within the neighbourhood. From there truck drivers will come and heave mounds of garbage into dump trucks. There is no regular schedule for pick up, often forcing residents to place empty phone calls to city hall. Truck drivers will get around to it when they feel like it. In fact they haven't felt like it since we arrived. [Update: A day after writing this, the garbage was picked up; we've been here for forty five days.]

Garbage just piles up in the streets. Its not uncommon to walk through smoldering piles of garbage on my way to a school or just on a relaxing walk through our neighbourhood. One of the worst things to see is when piles of garbage have been lit on fire resulting in toxic flames sparring together and smoke rising into the air. I don't know if people who do this (some of them city workers) actually know how unhealthy it is too burn garbage and the damage it can cause to both the human body and the environment. I wonder if they care.

More recently, I've seen children playing in the piles of garbage; a lot of them on fire. At first, Emma pointed it out to me but even walking to schools, I see it now. Children dig through the garbage, play in it, looking to find something radical as it is in flames. Its pathetic to see when you know how dangerous it is and the materials within the garbage.

Our site supervisor said to us, 'Somebody has to start to something about the garbage in our neighbourhood before it becomes a real problem.' Its unfortunate to know that with most aspects of life in Kenya something needs to be done about it not because Canada has a regimented garbage removal system but because there is now ownership on the government to do anything and no one who can do something about it cares about the garbage people live in and children play in.

The argument goes full circle back to good environments. Take for example a school. When you place mounds of garbage in front of the front entrance of a school nobody wants to go there and it is not an effective learning environment. The smell and sight agitate the teachers, students, parents and community members. The same can be said about the safety of roads. When piles of garbage are left on the road side, dangerous roads become even more dangerous. Vehicles have to swerve to miss the garbage and traffic becomes more congested because in some cases, road ways are reduced to one lane of through traffic.

One of the things that Conor is doing for his volunteer placement is garbage pickup to centralize garbage collection in the neighbourhoods. The Youth Alive clubs are trying to get students to take on litter as a personal responsibility by creating litter pick up days. Instead of waiting around for things to happen, litter pick up is one way children can make their lives in the slums a little better. These are small steps that will hopefully create a larger change. The city knows how to create change. This is the most frustrating concept. For example, when we are in the city centre to celebrate birthdays or going to the main park to play Frisbee, you can see multitudes of public garbage bins and very little litter. It’s the tourist effect. The city does this because they know tourists flock to the main city and want to create the image of a nice city but the reality of the rest of the people the city should be serving is ignored as proven by the piles of garbage that just lay there.

Garbage continues to be a job getter. People are able to pick up plastics and try to make a shilling off of other people’s care free attitude. Sanitation wise, it would be an excellent idea to pick up the garbage. When you eliminate health problems, think about the amount of problems that would dissipate as a result. Cholera would decrease because there is less of a chance of water contamination. Children could be healthier and wouldn’t succumb to sniffles, coughs or even asthma because the air their breathing would be cleaner and they would be given an opportunity to have clean communities to play in. The environment and overall standard of living would also increase and it doesn’t take much.

It’s no wonder why Coca Cola has such a successful recycling program in Africa. Charging deposits on bottles to get them returned and too be able to reuse them. What if these radical ideas were introduced somehow in relation to garbage? The possibilities are endless. Garbage can have many simple solutions and many complex solutions but the benefits are priceless. The next time you think about throwing litter on the ground, think about if everyone had the exact same attitude. Would your community turn into a slum?