Almost every day in Guatemala City I see plastic coke bottles fly out bus windows, crisp-packets flutter from cars, and everything from gum foil to polystyrene cups dropped mindlessly from the hands of adults and children alike. Something in me wants to yell, every time, “HEY YOU! Pick that up! Isn’t this YOUR country? Don’t you CARE?” But of course I keep my bossy foreign mouth shut.
It takes me back to the days before garbage-consciousness, when we all thought the world was big enough to take whatever we threw at it. I spent most of my childhood without giving a single thought to the question of rubbish. That was before most industrialized countries officially discovered recycling (though frugal country people like my parents – products of the 1930s depression – always hoped to re-use things, so they always had a shed full of junk). But nowadays I suspect every child living in the developed world is as thoroughly inculcated with a motto like, “Reduce, Re-use, Recycle,” as we were with the necessity of cleaning our plates because of the starving children in Africa. Our kids don’t get to make weekend trips to the “rubbish tip” and help offload a heap of indiscriminately mixed garbage. They might sometimes visit a waste management centre and deposit sorted containers of paper, glass, plastics and aluminium. Or maybe they are lucky enough to have a recycling collection service in their street.
But it’s not like that in Guatemala. As far as I can tell, the majority of people drop rubbish indiscriminately in public places, and no one seems to sort their household rubbish for recycling. There is no publicly run system of recycling - or garbage collection for that matter, although we pay only Q60 - USD 6.60 - per month for a daily pick-up service. I’ve only discovered one place where recyclable rubbish can be taken and I know of only one other family who uses it – not that I make this a regular conversation topic!
I would have to conclude that in general Guatemalans have a low level of environmental consciousness, including the where, what and when of garbage disposal. This is not altogether surprising, as approximately 75% of the population lives below the poverty line, so naturally their minds are concentrated on survival. And, while the very rich portion of the population is so rich that Guatemala reportedly has the highest per capita helicopter ownership in the world, the country’s wealth does not translate well into tax dollars. So governments are always struggling to provide even basic health and education services, without worrying about waste management centres and broader ecological education.
But the great irony is that sheer, desperate, poverty, means that the streets are kept clean and almost every single piece of rubbish that can be, is recycled or returned for a deposit. The city’s bad rubbish habits provide both employment for the many street sweepers, and a means of livelihood for the people who live off scrounging junk, albeit not the sort of livelihood most would hope for. As I find out more about the latter I’m thinking of reversing my recycling process, because I suspect that all I’m doing is removing the most lucrative part of the trade-in-garbage from the men who collect ours, and giving it to someone else who is already better off. So perhaps I should keep sorting it, but then put the sorted rubbish out for our collectors to take, including all the “good” bits.
On every city road, every day, there is a person sweeping along the edge, while buses, trucks and other old vehicles spew black diesel fumes over them. Sometimes I look along the vast tract of road ahead of the sweeper and wonder how they can keep their heart in it enough to make their arms move. They carry orange “witches hats” which they sit on the road beside them while they work, to alert drivers to their presence, and usually they wear lime green vests with the city crest, saying “infrastructure…. cumple” – the city mayor’s message to his voters that he is achieving his public infrastructure goals. Often there is insufficient space for cars to pass by them in the same lane, so at the very least they tend to cause minor traffic disruptions. This happens especially in peak morning traffic, which also seems to be the favourite time for sweeping (I often wonder why?). But, in an attitude of pure fatalism, many of them also sweep with their faces towards the edge of the road, ignoring the cars flying past within inches of their backs. A number of times I’ve only just seen the sweeper in time to avoid running him or her down, especially on a winding road. It looks to me like a high-risk occupation, but as government paid jobs I suspect the positions are quite sought after amongst the many unskilled labourers competing for any kind of work.
There is a much worse job to be had than street sweeping, and that’s the job of the garbage men. Correctly called rubbish collectors, or recolectors de basura, they are also sometimes called basureros, which is the same as the word for the city rubbish dump. Of course rubbish collection has never been a high status occupation anywhere, but in many countries the nastier aspects have been removed through the use of automated collection trucks. But here the work is very hands-on and the men who do it (they are all men) are invariably thin, slightly ragged and very dirty. They manually take bags of garbage or piles of garden cuttings from the street in front of people’s houses and carry them to the truck. Any loose rubbish is loaded onto frayed old sheets of woven nylon, which were probably sacks once. It seems symptomatic of their poverty that they can’t even replace their nylon sacks when they wear out, but keep using an ever-shrinking piece of frayed fabric. A few of the workmen are old and I often see them struggling across the road with loads so huge they can barely walk. The trucks look like retired removal vans, their dents and crumples painted over thickly in yellow with a green side stripe, and the rubbish is loaded into the back by hand. The trucks drive with one of the rear doors open, so it is possible to see what they do in there. Usually, two or three men collect on the street, while one stays in the truck and sorts every piece of rubbish that enters. They have big sacks attached to the inside walls, into which they fling bottles and cans and plastics. The rest of the rubbish seems to go into a general heap towards the front of the van, although large cardboard cartons and other big items might be tied to the roof or inside wall. The load slowly gets higher until it’s time to head to the rubbish dump. Then the workmen sit up on the pile of stinking loose garbage and snooze, or very occasionally smoke (while I pray there aren’t any flammables on board), while they head out of town.
So what happens next? I don’t know firsthand, especially questions like who gets first go at the profitable things like aluminium cans. But I do know that most of it ends up at a vast rubbish tip near Guatemala City, and that an entire community lives on, and off, the rubbish that goes there. Drifters and families, from the tiniest children to the very old, work the vast basurero - although it may be a misnomer to call them a community, as it is reputedly a rough and cutthroat business. I have never been there, but my son has been driven through a section of the rubbish dump on a school trip, as part of an ongoing community service project. They visited a school established nearby to provide education for the children and youth of the basurero. The school, called Safe Passage, or Camino Seguro, receives support from a range of donors, and it provides, food, clothing and other school supplies, as well as fun activities and academic teaching to children who would otherwise get no education at all. It aims to make a path out of a rubbish life for the children there, who suffer abuse and neglect and work long hours in a hideous and hazardous place. It is also a daily refuge from all that.
Last year my son’s fourth grade class prepared science kits for the children at Safe Passage. The teacher got them to use only materials that could be found in normal household rubbish, I thought probably to show creative use of what was available to the children at Safe Passage, rather than supplying them with short-term rich-kid products that could not be replaced once used. The class went there to meet the other children and demonstrate their science experiments to them. When our kids asked the others whether there was anything they could do to help more generally, one boy said (in Spanish) something like: “It is better if you don’t put rotten bananas in the same bag as useful things, and also good if you can wrap broken glass and sharp things so we don’t cut our hands so much.”
Mariposa Pesada
Note: You can check out the Camino Seguro website (incl English) at http://www.safepassage.org
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