Who’s talking trash?

2 May 2010

I’m coming up on my first full week back at home after being gone for a while. It sure is nice to be back in Ngong, sleep in my own bed, and play with my kitty Chavez again. I was in the southern part of the country for a good chunk of April, and apparently that was when the heat was the worst so I’m not too sad to have returned right when the rains started. Also, my French friend in town told me my French is much better now than when I left. Schwing! Anyway, I spent one week at IST (In-service training) in Foumban, a cultural-touristy city in the West (read: good food, not as hot) and then a week in Yaounde for a committee meeting—I joined the Environmental Education and Food Security Committee. I had a great time in both places, it was really fun to see all my friends from training again. I figured the Environmental Education committee be a good committee to join, particularly considering the poor treatment of the environment in my town. Plastic bags and sachets are everywhere, people relieve themselves whenever and wherever they feel like it, and whenever you finish with something, say a candy wrapper, you just drop it in the dirt. As some of you who have been to Africa know, this isn’t incredibly uncommon. Establishing some form of trash disposal isn’t generally high on the to-do list for most governments, though the population generally hates looking at all the trash around. The really sad part is that, like most problems, people blame all the trash around on poverty. There isn’t any money to clean things up, and there isn’t any money to change their ways. Which brings me to the first major project I’m undertaking…

Starting a trash collection system! The main thing people told me when I first got here was that our town is too dirty, we need to do something about it. (Often the person telling me this was flinging a bottle cap into the street or letting a plastic bag flutter off into the wind.) I tried to get something going with the chief of hygiene in town, a Monsieur Toloba, (actually a salaried position at the city hall) but due to a combination of an acute lack of French skills on my part, a mutual uncertainty of what the other’s job actually was, and a lack of funds, nothing really got started. Now, though, equipped with my apparently improved French, at least a feeling for how to get something done, some knowledge of where I might be able to find some funding, and a new sense of ambition to get some projects going, I approached M. Toloba earlier this week. Not only did he immediately jump on board, he’d already had something like this planned for a while, including a disposal system practically already in place. The only road block has been the mayor who hasn’t supplied any funds. We came up with a preliminary budget and hopefully this week we’ll get a map of Ngong and jump around to the different quartiers and see where we can install some trash cans.

The big problem in development work is how to make something sustainable. If you just come in and build something, eventually it’s going to break and then if there aren’t the proper resources—be it knowledge, money, etc.—it’ll just sit there broken and unused. What makes me excited about this project is that the city already has a means to dispose of the trash (depending on the month, Toloba has anywhere from 3-6 “agents” who work for him), a person who can be in charge of the project once my part is done, and the means to continue the project at a relatively low cost after we get the initial capital to get it running. I’m hoping to be able to get some funds through a Peace Corps program called SPA, and I believe the clams are provided by USAID. On a side note, if I’m not mistaken this is the only funding that comes to Cameroon from USAID—they pulled out of here a number of years ago. If that falls through, though, I might try something called a Peace Corps Partnership which is a program where I’ll make a description of my program and then Peace Corps will put that description online and people from around the world can donate to it from there. If that’s the case, I’ll make sure to post a link to it on this blog.

I think the toughest part about this project is going to be getting people to actually use the trash cans. Toloba and I are going to have to go around and sensitize many, many people in town as to the importance of the trash collection system and why they should use it. Also, we’ll have to pick the places in town where the trash cans can make the biggest difference. I’m going to make a bunch of flyers in French and Fulfulde and post them around town in the bars, restaurants, boutiques, and basically anywhere public.

Here’s hoping everything works out!