Trash: Out of sight, out of mind?

Living here in Niamey has reminded me of something that became so evident when I lived in Burkina.  With no trash disposal system, you become much more aware of how much trash you acquire.  With no daily or even weekly pick-up, the first question is: what do I do with my trash?  In my village in Burkina, the children would fight to ‘take out’ my trash as then they would have first dibs to the boxes, cans, bottles etc. that were treasures in their eyes and it wasn’t long before I would see bits and pieces of my ‘trash’ all over the village in the hands of the children and even sometimes adults.  I was always amazed at all the uses something like an empty box of cereal could have!   However, it also wasn’t long before I began to see the bits and pieces of my trash that weren’t usable (in their minds) floating in the wind throughout the village like true litter!  So one day I watched to see what really did happen to my trash once it left my house.  One or two children knocked on my door in the morning to ask for the small bag of trash and after practically grabbing it out of my hands, they ran as fast as possible around the back of our family courtyard, where the fields of millet were planted, and immediately dump the contents on the ground.  Other children, immediately appeared and circled around and all would fight over the best bits.  In a couple minutes, the group scattered with each walking away with their own ‘treasure’, paying no mind that the rest of the trash lay right there in the middle of the crops to be blown too and fro with the wind.  “Yeah,” I thought to myself, “this has got to stop.” Well, the only other option was to burn my trash, which I grew up learning was bad for the environment…but which is the lesser of two evils?  Trash littering the environment, or smoke from the trash polluting the air?  I chose the latter as the ash is helpful to add to the compost pile and the latrine pit.  Even so, it made me really think about the effects of trash such as empty cans have…you can’t burn them, and the opened lids, as most of us have been taught since we were kids, are extremely dangerous to hand to children to ‘play’ with.  In a village setting such as I was in, what then do you do?  Let’s just say it made me think twice or more about buying those sorts of items and bringing them back to use in the village.  There’s something really great about buying only fresh items from the market and using them that day with barely any remaining ‘trash’ to worry about.  Something the US can learn a lot about in their ‘out of sight, out of mind’ mentality.

 A common site throughout Niamey

Animal feeding ground

Well, now I’m back in West Africa, and though I’m not living in a village, there still is no official trash system and the litter around the city is quite unbelievable.  So I’m back to my trash never being ‘out of sight’ and therefore not ‘out of my mind’ so I’m also back to burning the ‘unusable’ trash; but there’s still the piles of unedible pieces of fruits and vegetables leftover everyday.  This led my housemate Susie and I to dig ourselves a little hole this past Saturday and start our own composting pit right in our own courtyard.  Next, we’re planning to start a little vegetable garden nearby that we can eventually fertilize with our compost, and Susie also recently bought chickens that we’ll have in our courtyard as well.  We’ll use their dung as fertilizer as well and have fresh eggs/protein.  This all makes such good sense in a context such as this where there is no trash system, extremely bad soil, and limited vegetable production.  Of course, I want to use it all as an opportunity to teach as well so Susie and I are hoping to bring the guards and their families into the whole process and let them share in the bounty.  We’ll see how that goes!  Stay tuned!

My new, wonderful housemate, Susie!  And one of our guards...yes, he insisted on helping us dig our compost pit.