In Which It’s All Just A Load Of Rubbish
on Zoe Page (Sierra Leone), 27/Oct/2010 23:35, 34 days ago
Some important health messages, prominently displayed around the hospital:There are a lot of things we take for granted, like Rubbish. With the exception of Mexico, I’ve never had major issues getting rid of my modest household waste in any country I’ve lived. Even there it was possible, though it involved either hanging around waiting for the bell to chime and indicate the daily collection van had arrived or sneaking your bags on to the street when it was dark and leaving them for the street cleaners to collect in the morning. Not so here.While Junior still had access to the house he used to empty my bins for me with alarming frequency. Seriously, one empty Oreos packet and it would get emptied. Now I have banned him from entering my house uninvited, things are different. I know that somewhere there must be a local rubbish dump but I’ve not been able to find it on my wanders. I’ve asked Junior twice to show me where it is, but he first refused and then said he didn’t know where it was as it moves around.Today when I head out he grabs me and says he will take my rubbish tomorrow and deposit it‘in the river where it will float away’. Nice. And yet, if that is the official means of disposal, as icky as it is for the environment, I wish he’d just show me. At the moment I have a few plastic bags tied up outside. I was wary to do at first assuming the rats would come, but they don’t seem to have done, and it was getting too old to keep in the house (banana skins plus mouldy lentils, not a good mix).On Monday when I was playing at being the secretary’s secretary I had to type a memo aboutDoor to Door Waste Management, a new initiative they wanted to launch to provide employment for the city’s youth. Interesting that that was the leading reason for it: you’d think the health benefits of hygienic waste disposal would be much more important. The proposal is for people to buy bins that will live outside their houses. They will also purchase a frequency of service to suit them and however often a week they want, the youth will come round and take away their trash. It sounds good in theory, and certainly better than dumping stuff in the rivers, but the question of whether or not everyone will have the money for this remains, along with what will happen to the waste of those who don’t once the official dumping grounds are removed. In another world I’d also wonder whether they have people queuing up to be bin men, but here unemployment is so massive I think they would have. Yesterday Pius’ son came into the office for a bit. He’s studying IT at the polytechnic and in his final year. I asked him whether he would stay in the metropolis that is Kenema after graduating (obviously not phrasing it quite like that) and he said he would if he was fortunate enough to get a job here. I can’t imagine what it would be doing. There are insane numbers of people here who literally sit outside their houses or loiter on the streets all day. I have no idea how they survive, but I know that most people at the hospital are supporting families of a dozen or more people on the meagre salaries. This kind of explains why I’m often the only person in the supermarket paying £1.20 for a carton of juice.Today we have a number of power cuts. It should indicate the start of the dry season but it rained heavily last night, so that doesn’t work. I now have a preferred time of day for power cuts: between 3pm and 6pm, so after I may have come in for a siesta and a little light DVD watching, and before it goes dark and we need the lights on. Today we have one from 3pm to 5pm, but then another at 7pm, before my laptop’s had chanceto charge fully. And yet, even this is not too bad, as it means there’s a chance power will return before 9pm when I want to doze off with my fan on. The mossie net keeps out air as well as critters, so it gets really hot without the electricity induced breeze oscillating over me. It doesn’t return, so in the end I go all caveman and go to bed early because it’s dark, guessing (hoping?) that it’s highly likely they’ll be power by the time I wake up.