Stashing Trash in Aboansan

Today I went early to the village preschool to do a game with the children. The idea was to offer incentives to the kids to clean up their village.


There is trash everywhere here, not just in the village but also in Buduburam, Tema, Kasoa, and even Accra, the capital city. Even if you want to throw your trash away, good luck finding a trashcan! Recycling? Forget it! I always assumed that this was a cultural thing--not a cultural laziness but a cultural apathy--that environmentalism has been a cause championed primarily by the white bourgeoisie and the educated elite. Though I am sure that it is not just white foreigners that care about the environment in Ghana, all of the sustainable hostels that I've heard about (both ones that exist now and ones that plan to be built) are the work of white foreigners, save one. However, it is worth mentioning that Accra recently instituted sanitation services (garbage pickup) as a way to create jobs. But I've been told that the small number of formal landfills (formal, as in, not the ground) fill quickly, which causes one of two things to happen. Either the trash is burned or the trash collectors simply stop picking up trash while continuing to collect a paycheck. My guess is that it's some of both. It's hard to say which is worse anyway. Pick the lesser of two evils: carcinogens or government corruption.


But back to the game... I brought ten trash bags and asked Mary, the teacher, to divide up the children into teams. I told her that each team had to have at least one girl and at least one child under five-years-old on it. The teams were told to fill their bags with trash (or "rubbish," as they say). No pushing. No shoving. No taking trash from other team's bags. Every member of a team that filled a bag got a piece of candy and every member of the team that filled their bag the fasted got and piece of candy and ten pesewas. I thought it was pretty clever--not brilliant, but clever.


Since kids will do anything if there's candy involved, it was pretty easy to get them on board. Mary told them they could start and they took off. I saw two teams stuffing their bag with grass, so I told Mary to tell them "trash only." The game was over more quickly than I had expected it to be. Solomon's team won and got their prized reward. Emmanuel's team came in a close second and their bag was heavier than Solomon's team's bag so I gave them an extra candy each.


When the school day was coming to a close, Mary and I were walking towards the site of the new school building when she asked me what I was going to do with the bags full of trash. Surprised, I said, "Throw them away, of course." Mary is a woman of few words (even in her native tongue), and all I got from her was a blank look and a bemused half-smile. I told her that my goal was to entice the children to clean up their otherwise beautiful village. Again, blank stare. I chose to ignore it, deciding that even if it struck her as silly it was still less trash in the village. I told Morris that we would be carrying the bags back with us. He then told Mary that we were carrying the bags back to Buduburam. I am pretty sure that Morris said what he did so that I would take a hint. Bringing the bags with us all the way back to Buduburam was virtually impossible because trying to bring ten big bags of trash is a definite no-go. But when I said back, I meant back to the road, which was about a half-mile's walk down the dirt road that splits the brush because I assumed that where there is a paved road, there will be a trashcan--wrong! Apparently the closest dumpster to Aboansah is the one that was installed by the UN in the refugee camp about ten miles away. "What?!"


I realized then that not a single one of the kids, or Mary for that matter, understood the larger purpose of the game. They stuffed grass in the bags because they didn't get it, not because they were trying to cheat the game. They threw the candy wrappers on the school floor right next to the filled trash bags, not because they are short-sighted kids, but because the idea that putting trash in any sort of waste receptacle is ideal is completely lost on them.


Morris tells me that there is a group of volunteers ages eight to fourteen coming sometime after me to teach about and improve sanitation in the village. I am planning a mini-lesson about sanitation to give to the preschool children (remember they range in age from two to ten-years-old) and to the community peace cell leaders on Monday, but I'll have to leave the bulk of the work on this issue to the new volunteers. For now, I'll just keep playing the game.