On Friday, August 10 I helped in a Busia town clean-up event in one of the slums near the Kenyan border. The slum is called Marachi. I went with some of the other Peace Corps volunteers here in town along with the Busia Town Council, the Mayor and my friend Boris from the German Development Organization. Boris is working with the town council to promote water sanitation as well as community hygiene. Thankfully the sun held off to allow us to work without getting too sunburnt! It was such an eye-opening experience. The first site that we went to was completely overwhelming. It was a public dump site about the size of a basketball court. The trash had been collecting for 3 months. There were homes and stores and outdoor cooking areas surrounding the site, and children were running through the mud and trash in bare feet. The smell was enough to make us gag, but we all grabbed a shovel or a rake and got to work. We worked and worked making piles, lifting them onto empty rice sacks and then onto the back of a rented dump truck. My shoes got covered in God-knows-what. There must have been about 20 of us working, 5 being muzungus which drew all of the children in the slums out to watch the white people work.
About an hour in, the equivalent to a town crier with a megaphone started walking around us informing everyone who didn’t already see the muzungus digging to come and watch. While we worked we were constantly dodging chickens that were lavishing the freshly dug up cockroaches and beetles Even though the slum is about a 15 minute walk from my house, where most of my neighbors speak the Ugandan language I learned (Lusamia), all of the children looked confused this morning when we tried to speak with them. One of our Ugandan co-workers explained that most of the children spoke either Swahili or Karamojong. When I inquired as to the reason, he explained that nearly all of the inhabitants of the slum were either refugees from Somalia or internally-displaced people from Karamoja. There must have been at least 6 or 7 kids for every adult I saw today. So many children!! They were swarming around us, pinching our skin and staring from every direction. There was a steady trail of children behind us as we moved from site to site. Not only were there so many kids, but I was really disheartened at the amount of sick and dirty children I saw. As we were digging, the children were picking up pieces of trash to play with and putting them in their mouths. I started to get upset watching the kids and discovering that no matter how much we dug and raked and picked up, there were so many layers of trash underneath that I just couldn’t see any good in what we were doing. The soil seemed so inundated with waste that I felt we were barely scratching the surface. We dug up vegetables, egg shells, paper and other very biodegradable or compost-able waste, yet the amount of black plastic bags I found was really discouraging. The ground was covered in tons of plastic that will never decompose. It made me so sad to see it all. I can’t imagine how many layers of plastic were underneath us. With all the layers of trash, I cannot even begin to imagine what must be seeping into the groundwater. I became really scared, looking at all the little faces staring up at me with runny noses and eyes and thinking about what they must be ingesting when they drink untreated or non-boiled water.
Although I was initially discouraged and sad, by the end of the day I found solace in the fact that so many people turned out to help us. The town crier, who initially was announcing the spectacle of the labouring mizungus, eventually was able to rally many of the children and other community members to come and help clean up their neighbourhood. Seeing the way we all pulled together, I guess I realized that there is something good lying underneath the surface of my surroundings.
About an hour in, the equivalent to a town crier with a megaphone started walking around us informing everyone who didn’t already see the muzungus digging to come and watch. While we worked we were constantly dodging chickens that were lavishing the freshly dug up cockroaches and beetles Even though the slum is about a 15 minute walk from my house, where most of my neighbors speak the Ugandan language I learned (Lusamia), all of the children looked confused this morning when we tried to speak with them. One of our Ugandan co-workers explained that most of the children spoke either Swahili or Karamojong. When I inquired as to the reason, he explained that nearly all of the inhabitants of the slum were either refugees from Somalia or internally-displaced people from Karamoja. There must have been at least 6 or 7 kids for every adult I saw today. So many children!! They were swarming around us, pinching our skin and staring from every direction. There was a steady trail of children behind us as we moved from site to site. Not only were there so many kids, but I was really disheartened at the amount of sick and dirty children I saw. As we were digging, the children were picking up pieces of trash to play with and putting them in their mouths. I started to get upset watching the kids and discovering that no matter how much we dug and raked and picked up, there were so many layers of trash underneath that I just couldn’t see any good in what we were doing. The soil seemed so inundated with waste that I felt we were barely scratching the surface. We dug up vegetables, egg shells, paper and other very biodegradable or compost-able waste, yet the amount of black plastic bags I found was really discouraging. The ground was covered in tons of plastic that will never decompose. It made me so sad to see it all. I can’t imagine how many layers of plastic were underneath us. With all the layers of trash, I cannot even begin to imagine what must be seeping into the groundwater. I became really scared, looking at all the little faces staring up at me with runny noses and eyes and thinking about what they must be ingesting when they drink untreated or non-boiled water.
Although I was initially discouraged and sad, by the end of the day I found solace in the fact that so many people turned out to help us. The town crier, who initially was announcing the spectacle of the labouring mizungus, eventually was able to rally many of the children and other community members to come and help clean up their neighbourhood. Seeing the way we all pulled together, I guess I realized that there is something good lying underneath the surface of my surroundings.
