A dirty problem

I find myself thinking about trash a lot here. At home I sometimes marvel at how much trash I could produce in a week, but then I’d just put out the barrels and the recycling on Tuesday morning and by Tuesday afternoon they’d be empty again, ready for me to refill. Where does it all go? I guess it goes to a landfill somewhere, but I have absolutely no idea where, or what it looks like, or who manages it, or what it smells like. I also have no idea how much our system of waste management costs. I guess that’s what property taxes are for … but I really don’t know.

Here, the trash problem is unavoidable. At the school it is a very tightly managed process. Metal, glass, compost and burnable trash are separated. The metal cans need to be crushed with a shovel and thrown with the glass into the metal pit in the corner of the playground where they will stay for … eternity, I guess. The compost is added to the pile, turned every few days, and sifted every few weeks. Everything else – including plastic – is thrown in the incinerator and burned every few days. We’re even working on saving certain types of plastic and metal that can be recycled. Within the school walls, this process works well, and it is rare to find a piece of trash out of place.

Outside the walls of LCS it’s a different story. Trash is everywhere. On the drive from the airport to the school one passes piles and piles of trash on the side of the road. Sometimes the piles are on fire with thick black smoke drifting into the air. In the neighborhood around the school there is trash littering the gardens and yards and roads – from plastic bags to metal cans to plastic bottles. What the heck are people supposed to do with it? I know they burn their own trash near their own homes, but there’s no public sanitation system. There are few public trash cans (and these are only in the city, not in the surrounding towns.) I really can’t figure it out.

We’re working hard with the kids to get them to take a real responsibility for the neighborhood around the school as well as for the school itself. We’ve started taking little groups of kids out in the afternoon during cleanup hour to pick up the trash in the neighborhood and bring it back to the school’s incinerator to burn. The hope is that after it’s clean, we can install some public trash cans, and teach our neighbors to use them, and to bring them into the school to be burned when they’re full. But wow, these first few days of this project have been hard. It reminds me of the most challenging PHA community service day ever. Try to convince a bunch of teenagers to pick up trash with their hands, when they know that these are just a few streets in all of Haiti, and that they will probably just look the same tomorrow. Seriously, it’s like getting PHA kids excited about raking leaves in a Somerville park in October when there are still tons of leaves on the trees overhead. Feels a bit like shouting into the wind. But after a few days, when the kids started to see progress, their attitude started to shift from feet dragging and whiny to cautiously optimistic to genuinely proud of their work. The best part was when the little kids from the neighborhood joined us, because if this is going to work at all, it’s going to be because those same little kids get their parents to use the trash cans instead of just dropping their trash in the street.

Then yesterday we took a small group of the oldest students out of the neighborhood onto the national road nearby. It’s one of the reasonably well paved roads (thanks to the US army corps of engineers back in the 1920’s) but it is lined with piles of trash up to the ankles. We went out with shovels, pickaxes, wheelbarrows, buckets, some diesel fuel and matches. For two hours kids, teachers, staff, and volunteers raked the trash into piles, pulled out and crushed the metal cans, and lit the piles on fire. I know, it’s gross. Burning plastic is dangerous and the fumes were kind of gross. But like I said, what else are people supposed to do? And maybe it is just a few streets in all of Haiti, but I guess we have to start somewhere.