The first day of March marked the first day of Campaign “Zero
Sachets,” a campaign to clean Kaya up.
This campaign was initiated by the Governor’s office and on the first of
March all of the city’s civil servants went around cleaning up the town. However, the cleanup did not go very
far. I took the following pictures March
2 and unfortunately I did not see much in terms of “cleanliness.”
As those of you who have visited me here (Mom, Rebecca), you
understand what I’m talking about when I say that Burkina is dirty. Even if you take away the dust and sand
(which cannot be helped as Burkina is a Sahlian country), you will still find
Burkina extremely dirty. The main reason
for this, in my opinion, is a lack of cleaning services, such as trash pickup,
dumps, etc. There are hardly any trash
cans found anywhere, so people just dump their trash out their windows. This leads to trash everywhere, in particular
black plastic bags “sachets.”
My neighbors pride themselves on being very clean. Clean to them means having a clean courtyard. They collect the trash from inside the courtyard and throw it outside the courtyard. Therefore they are clean. I, on the other hand, collect my burnable trash and burn it, so it is not littering up the inside of my courtyard nor the outside world. The unburnable trash is a little more difficult. For the most part, I try to give away things that I do not want anymore to Burkinabe, such as boxes, containers, etc. Other trash goes down the latrine, I am sorry to say. Latrine trash includes old batteries and expired medication. I know this is not the best thing for the environment, but otherwise I will see children sucking on the batteries and trying to eat the medication. Not good. But what else can I do?
A few weeks ago I was in the alimentation, the boutique closest to a grocery store here in Kaya, talking to the cashier. A man approaches the cashier, pays for his items and then proceeds to take them out of the packaging and drop the packaging on the floor. I ask him if he is going to pick that up and put it in the trashcan not two feet from him. He says “No why don’t you do that, or are you not nice?” I said of course I’m not going to pick it up for him, that’s his job to clean up his own mess. He laughs and storms out to his car. Of course this pissed me off to no end. Here is this larger man (meaning that he has enough money to drink lots of beers to give him a beer belly) that doesn’t care enough about Kaya, Burkina, the world (I don’t know) to pick up a measly piece of trash and then proceeds to get into his luxury car (meaning he has even more money/is probably pretty well educated in terms of Burkina). After this encounter the cashier thanked me for standing up to him. If the cashier had said anything the customer would have complained that those who work there are not polite or good to their customers. What kind of world do we live in?
Now that I’ve gone on about this enough, I wish I knew some way to change the mentality here (that goes for many different subjects). But it seems that I will just have to do my part and maybe if others see me picking up black sachets, they will follow suit.
Trash next to the biggest garden in Kaya
Trash outside of an old palace in Kaya. The sign says "Illegal to dump trash here."
