Trashed

One of the biggest surprises so far is the amount of garbage that is everywhere. Traditionally, I’m sure that the good jungle giveth and the good jungle taketh away – people would pick a banana and throw the useless skin back into the bush where it would disappear and never be seen again. But now when you throw out a bottle or a wrapper, it sticks around. The ditches next to the road and even the road itself is often littered with non-biodegradable waste. I’ve watched as people drop candy wrappers out of bus windows and others just fling stuff to the side of the road.

When someone has a pile of trash they’ll normally burn it – plastics, and whatever else is in there. Sometimes when we leave early enough in the morning there will be burning piles of trash all along the dirt path we hike up to the road. In the evening, sometimes there are so many burning piles of trash in Arusha town that the entire city is covered in a smoky haze.

From a public health perspective this is both a respiratory and environmental hazard. So, we’ve got a couple of projects focused on waste management. One of them is in a community called Kikatiti where we’ll be participating in the movement of a village trash pile (I’ll put up some pics tomorrow) and participating in a weeklong education fair. One of the focuses will be waste management. Another is a project that Elliot and I are putting together to have volunteers picking up trash in our neighborhood if they get home early from projects. I’m interested in the effect on the “Broken Window Theory,” of both projects. In essence, it is a criminology theory that states that a broken and unkempt urban environment creates social norms that also suggests a lack of care and therefore encourages crime. The most common example of the evidence for the theory was the rapid drop in crime rate in NYC after a focus on “idirect” causes of crime like public urination or vandalism.

So my question is if cleaning up a neighborhood can (arguably) reduce crime, can cleaning up the country change the attitudes of people who live there? It’s something I hope to examine a bit as we work piece by piece on our street.

As for all you wonderful readers back home – in our Kikatiti education week, we’ll be having a week long competition for the best reuse of “trash.” Whether it is aluminum coke bottle caps into earings, or a water bottle into a childes windmill toy, we’re going to have people submit their creations and promote the reusing items like cans, bottles and bags instead of throwing them into the woods. Do you have any fun ideas? If someone comes up with an idea ingenious enough to create a market, who knows – we could create the dala dala garbage industry!