Trash

Eric and Cristina were both gone for periods of time this past week.  In their absence, they asked me to watch over Lady.  This gave me an excuse to get outside of the house and check out the neighborhood.  It's a very hilly (as most of Haiti is) so simply keeping my footing was an adventure in itself.  (Just a few weeks ago, Eric cracked a couple ribs walking the dog).

But it wasn't the rugged terrain which caught my eye.  I had mentioned this in my first video blog, but it still gets me when I see it.  There is trash everywhere!  Obviously this is the first thing the dog jumps in when she sees it, but that's beyond the point.

Trash in our Backyard

Being a third world country, Haiti lacks many basic services many of us in the States enjoy.  There is no trash collection, much less decent roads for garbage trucks to travel.  Since there is no communal place for trash to be stored, it gets dispersed throughout the entire city.  And I'm not sure who is to take the blame on this.  Neither the government nor the private sector provides any sort of trash collection, yet it's also on the individual to show a little environmental stewardship. 

I think this is more a case Haiti being an underdeveloped country.  I saw underdeveloped as opposed to undeveloped in the sense that Haiti is living in the 21st century, but it's development over the past 200 years have clearly been behind the curve.  They've witness many of the trends seen by other areas of the world in the past couple centuries, namely the urbanization of it's people and commercial globalization.  The are large masses of people in the cities.  Nearly one-third of the country's population lives in the Port-au-Prince area.  And all these residents have access to many consumable products we have in the United States.  You can find many street vendors selling plastic bottles of soda or some sort of snack food.  Yet, Haiti is clearly not developed in many other elements of daily life.  Several areas of infrastructure, for example, is either installed and poorly maintained, or completely absent.  The roads are built from asphalt, but low maintenance requires 4-wheel drive simply to get through town.  There's a power grid, but the capacity of the country's power plants do not even come close to the demand.  Most of the power plants run at 50% or below capacity.

I think this leads me back to the first point, all the trash.  Clearly when you condense people into a smaller area, and provide many of them with the use-once-and-throw-away products we've grown accustomed to in the US without providing a means to dispose or recycle the waste, this is what you end up with.  Now, some of the trash does get burned.  Actually a lot, but you can't burn it all.  There's simply too much, you'd make all of Port-au-Prince a blazing inferno.  Plus, alot of the product would give off toxic fumes when burned.  The amount of trash, has caused me to rethink my own consuming habit while down here.  I no longer buy any juice in plastic jugs, one because there's no facilities to recycle, but also the burning would lead to air-born pollutants and toxins.

The underdeveloped nature of Haiti also is the major reason behind the devastation of the earthquake.  When you stack millions of people into a small area, living in 200 year old buildings with no first response, you can expect catastrophic results when a natural hazard occurs.