B. Mezgebu
18 October 2006
opinion
Addis Ababa — He told his story on the BBC World Service, aired last week. He is Mr. Trash man; that at least is the nickname his neighbors have given him since he retired and subsequently assumed a new avocation. The way his face lit up on the screen when he said that, he doesn't seem to mind the sobriquet at all.
After retiring to one little town somewhere in England, he took up the hobby of collecting garbage on his own. With a plastic bag in one hand and a handy contraption to pick the trash from the ground, the man would walk from one street to another picking up trash that he sees on his way. When he has his garbage bag full, he would empty it out and resume his rounds.
After a while, as he told it, his beat expanded. It began to include recreation areas and even ski resorts and mountains. There was no question of any form of financial remuneration. Mr. Garbage man was doing this labor of love out of sense of duty, one assumes.
The adage that if each person did their share to clean their community, then the whole city would be cleaner was not good enough for our man. To him, walking the extra mile literally and metaphorically was what was needed to make the Earth a better place to live.
That was in England. I happen to know here too, in Addis, a Ms. Recycle. A young Ethiopian who happens to be a keen follower of up to the minute dress fashion in her own right. So you wouldn't suspect this woman of having to do anything with old hat recycling or reuse.
But yes, she is an adherent and a stalwart practitioner of re-use and recycling. She is a literal believer, one would think, of one of the rules of thermodynamics that you can not destroy matter but that you can happily go on changing one form into another, to your heart's desire.
She says she can't explain why so many people throw away good trash and have to pay for its disposal besides. Fruit and vegetable peelings, used plastics, ashes, eggshells, bones etc. are to her household things of value and potential cost cutting.
For many people reuse and recycling have seemed like mere theoretical talk that even the most developed nations have difficulty applying on a regular and mainstream basis. Not so to Ms. Re-use.
The two environmentalists mentioned above are, of course, exceptions to the ocean of humanity. Some sort of altruism must be pushing these people to do what they do. In both cases a lot of hard work is entailed.
In the first instance, economic benefit is totally out. What Mr. Garbage man does is just walk, pick and dispose, over and over again. In the second case, the lady might be sparing herself some expenditure, but managing the garbage as she does is not as simple as it sounds.
Ethiopians in this modern age tend to have more and more of throw-away culture. Not in the sense of use-and-throw, most of us are perhaps too poor to practice that kind of lifestyle.
By throw away, I mean doing so at the wrong place, preferably under one's feet, at random and impulsively. A trash bin could be sitting at the next bend of the road and on our way, or even just under our noses; many of us prefer to let go of any litter on the street. We more often than not fail to make the mental connection between a litter in hand and the garbage bin.
Littering in Addis is reaching critical levels these days. Although the Provisional City Administration is doing a lot to have piled up garbage removed, still the volume of litter accumulated in certain parts of the City can not be defensible.
It is ironic that there are many among African countries that despite similar problems of economy and policies with ours, have managed to keep their cities and towns tidy. Perhaps we should learn from them.
In Addis the size of the population size threatens to swallow every improvement into nothingness. If you have 20-30 per cent of the citizens with not even a semblance of toilet facilities, how can you prevent parts of the city from becoming an open-air toilet?
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