Limpieza

Earlier in the week, one of the youth group leaders told me they were organizing a street cleanup for the dance we had yesterday, which was on the street (in the pouring rain.) On such short notice and with a heavy teaching schedule, I didn't have time to contribute to the organization of this cleanup, so I decided to just show up and see how my community runs its cleaning campaigns.

The results were at once funny and horrifying. About a dozen women walked down the street with brooms, sweeping dust, leaves and trash into little piles on the sides of the street. Then a group of boys came behind with shovels and wheelbarrows to collect these piles and dump them in random people's yards.

There is no trash collection in my village; both I and the previous volunteer have spoken with the mayor of our municipio about it, and she has flat-out refused to collect trash anywhere outside the bigger town of Santa Maria Ostuma. So I bring a bag of trash to the town occasionally on the bus to dump it in a trash can there. I'm sure the villagers think I'm crazy for this.

Their preferred solution is to either leave trash on the street or burn it. But a great deal of this trash is plastic potato-chip bags and bottles. They don't realize that burning this stuff releases toxic fumes (as if the horrible smell alone didn't tell them) and think that throwing it on the ground is OK because it is "compost."

Friday, as people told me over and over that plastic soda bottles would fertilize their soil, I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing. Because really, it's not these people's fault. Up until 25 or 30 years ago, there were no plastics in El Salvador and all the trash was organic -- people drank out of coconut shells, food came wrapped in banana leaves, etc. People could throw anything on the ground and it would, in fact, decompose and provide nutrients to the soil. When plastics came, no one explained to these people that they just couldn't do the same thing.

Still, most of El Salvador has absolutely no trash management system whatsoever, making it almost impossible to do the most important part of my job as an environmental volunteer. Until the Salvadoran government does something to change this, we Peace Corps volunteers are powerless to keep the trash from building up in our streets, a problem which is so bad that it's one of the first things foreigners notice about this country.

I miss trash cans and littering fines.

Paz y amor.