Trash

Plastic bottles, discarded plastic bags, torn shirts and pieces of shoes, batteries, broken ceramic mugs, fishing nets, shattered beer bottles and countless other remnants of third world life…

 

As far as the eye could see.

 

We have come to clean.  The lake shore next to the dump is littered with trash that couldn’t seem to make it into the actual dump site, not more than 100 yards away.  We have bags, rakes, machetes to slash the thorn bushes and gloves.  We are told to rake the trash into piles so we can burn it.  And so, as the time passes, the hill becomes choked with the acrid smell of burning plastic and rubber.  Nausea sweeps over me as I scan the horizon.

 

Despair.

It’s not right.  The women who live next to the dump sit and laugh at us.  Many of these women likely prostitute themselves out to the fishermen in order to obtain fish to sell at the market.  It is a vicious cycle of poverty and voluntary slavery just to survive.

 

Filth.  We are surrounded by it.  There are places in the bushes that have become makeshift toilets that the fishermen use, even though there are bathrooms less than 50 yards away.  Next to the toilets are piles of unused condoms.  Piles and piles of them.  In the trash.

 

A little girl from the village walks up to me.

 

“Habari,” I say, a greeting in Swahili.  She doesn’t say anything. 

 

“Amosi?” I try the local language, Luo.  She still silently stands.

 

Without speaking, she reaches down and grabs some trash, with her tiny bare hands.  She throws it in the bag and looks up at me.  She can’t be more than 6 years old.

 

“Stay here,” I say, as I gesture with my hands.

 

I run over to JP and grab another pair of gloves.  I run back to the girl and help her to put on the grossly oversized rubber gloves.  Her tiny fingers get trapped in the cavernous spaces of the glove’s fingers, but after a few minutes she is ready.

 

Plastic bottles, discarded plastic bags, torn shirts and pieces of
shoes, batteries, broken ceramic mugs, fishing nets, shattered beer
bottles and countless other remnants of third world life…

 

They go into the bag.  They go into the fire.  They float up in the smoke, mixing with the futility in our minds and the mourning in our hearts.  I tell myself in these times that I bring the Spirit with me into whatever situation I encounter, and that there is always hope.  There is always hope.

 

I look down at her.  Though the gloves are sliding off of her hands, though we are literally standing in a field of defeat, she picks up one piece of trash at a time and carefully places it in the bag.

 

“Gina lako ni nani?”  I ask.  “What’s your name?”

 

In the smallest voice, she replies:

 

“Patience.”