Rubble Rubble Toil and Trouble...zing!

Ok, so it’s happening, I’m becoming an environmentalist! And frankly I’m a bit ashamed to say that I wasn’t particularly interested before. It’s not like I was ever “pro pollution” or anything (although years of not recycling speaks differently) it’s more like I just chose not to place that particular weight on my shoulders. I think this is the case with many Americans, as quite seriously placing the “weight of the world on your shoulders” can be exhausting; and besides, someone else will deal with it, right? I mean in America, we hardly see the waste we produce and we produce what, like 3 times more than the other countries in the world!?

I remember returning home from 6 weeks spent studying in Senegal and noticing just how clean everything in America is, it’s practically sterile! The gas stations on the highway are spotless, not to mention the immaculate highways themselves (thanks Adopt-a-Highway program)! This is definitely not the case for major roads here in Senegal, nor for non major roads. Garbage is a very visible part of life.

A constant battle with volunteers here is the trash situation. What do you do with your waste when there is no wastebasket to throw it in? After all, the shrill voice of our childhood friend the litter bug yelps at us each time we go to throw a wrapper on the ground. “But everyone else does it!” I find myself too often protesting back at him. “Just because everyone is doing it, does that make it right?” This is what usually gets me packing my waste into a small plastic bag for as long as I can until it explodes and I then shove it into another plastic bag (crap! Even more waste!) and eventually I toss it all out for garbage collection (which does actually exist in my town). This collected garbage goes down the road to behind the school, where it is dumped into a giant pile. Pigs from the nearby Christian community come a flocking and goats call it their feeding trough. Honestly, not different than what we do in America, just more visible. So with inescapable images of garbage surrounding me and my working daily with plants and trees, it was only a matter of time before I’d start to connect these images and realize that we are really pissing off Mother Earth.

Today I was talking to a woman by my office who was sweeping in front of her house (a very common scene here. Everyone sweeps sand all the time) She asked me if we do this in America, to which I replied, “no, not really. We tend not to sweep the outdoors (unless it’s the sidewalks in select cities). But we do rake leaves!” She understood this and asked me if we burn them once we’re done, like they do with both the gathered leaves and the gathered garbage. At this time I realized that I don’t really know. I mean the raked leaves get collected right? By garbage men, maybe? And taken to…ummm somewhere? At this point I was hoping in my head that they get taken somewhere to decompose for compost because how awesome! Getting a bunch of people to do the labor of collecting the leaves and then you can just sit back, watch them decompose and use it in your garden! Until I remembered that I am here in Senegal and those leaves are far away in America whereas the leaves here are being burned. But still, I mean I don’t know what happens to those leaves nor do I really know what happens to any of the waste, natural or synthetic, that neatly gets collected each week by the men in suits. Anyways, I totally fibbed and said that we often didn’t burn the leaves (we def do, right?) because leaves give back to the soil if you let them sit there long enough.

In conclusion: I don’t know a thing about the waste management system in America. I just know that things are done so that the rest of us don’t have to carry that weight on our shoulders. And honestly I think that the biggest disservice we can do to ourselves is hiding the mess that we are making. It is really hard to go back, and so I don’t expect that every American will begin organically farming for himself, but I do hope that the school systems are putting a particular emphasis on environmental education. So what do I plan to do now that I’m a self proclaimed environmentalist? Yeah, I mean probably not that much, and I definitely don't plan on preaching to everyone in my life as that would be horribly hypocritical. I will continue to educate myself on the environment, how it works, how I fit in, what I can do to preserve it or at least not damage it. I will continue playing in the school garden with kids, and hopefully our discussions about composting or how bugs eating plants isn’t always so bad, will stick in some of their minds. I will make an effort to not turn blindly to all waste material collected by men in suits because this creates a dangerous distance from the damage I can cause by some of the decisions I make. I figure if I have to annoyingly deal with the waste that I produce, I’ll be deterred from creating so much.

Blog playlist: Imogen Heap- Earth (Album: Ellipse)


Check it out: An awesome waste management project started by Peace Corps volunteers in Joal, Senegal.