There are three plastic trash buckets under the wooden countertop in our kitchen. A red one, for burnable trash, that is emptied into the incinerator every Friday. A blue one with a lid, for food waste that will either be thrown down a compost pit or fed to the chickens. The last one, a green bucket, is for everything else - the plastic wrappers and aluminum foil and broken glass. The “everything else” bucket is emptied into The Pit, a deep hole originally dug as a possible well that did not yield water. Medical waste like used needles and dirty gloves are dumped in The Pit, along with our household trash. During rainy season, The Pit fills with groundwater and the trash inside swells toward to top; now at the end of the dry season the bottom is barely visible. We avoid throwing big things into The Pit, if possible, knowing that it will inevitably fill up and need to be replaced with a new one.
Most trash that would end up in The Pit is recycled. Not put into blue bins with yellow arrow triangles on them – recycled as in reused. The TB patients in the morning take their pills with water in “cups” that are actually empty medicine containers – multivitamins, albendazole, ferrous sulfate, phenobarbitone, amoxicillin. We wash the tin cans and the jelly jars and potato chip canisters and water bottles reuse them as cups for patients or toys for kids. We use flimsy plastic bags from market as barf-bags for patients on car trips to Jimma (most rural Ethiopians aren’t accustomed to car travel!), and if no one throws up, we use the little bags to hold the fruit that we buy from roadside vendors. Staff members fight over the big Nido powdered milk cans with snap on plastic lids. One perk to being the cleaner or cook at our Big House is having first pick of the nice glass jars and cardboard boxes. Any substantial plastic bags are saved and used to carry food from market, since the food is sold by the kilo and bags are not usually provided. I realized the worth of our used tin cans when I saw similar used cans being sold for profit in the marketplace.
Most of our non-burnable, non-compostable trash is from the clinic. There are two trash baskets in every clinic room, one for burnable things like tongue depressors and used gauze and another for non-burnables like disposable syringes and latex gloves. The disposable cardboard “safety boxes” for sharps like needles and razors are first burned in a barrel to dispose of the bulky cardboard box and to melt down any little plastic pieces, and then the charred remains are dumped in The Pit. I am amazed by the amount of trash that our little clinic creates, until I remember hospitals and clinics in the US, where everything that touches a patient is disposable. Most of our household non-burnable, non-compostable trash is not local – it comes from Addis. Ramon noodle packages, candy-bar wrappers, the foil lining from inside boxes of cornflakes. Even more comes from the United States. What else can we do with the reams of bubble wrap that have accumulated over the years? Old CD’s and DVD’s scratched beyond repair, shiny puzzles with missing (or rat-chewed) pieces, broken flashlights, electronics fried by the 220 volt outlets.
There is no litter in rural Ethiopia. I am accustomed to roadsides strewn with plastic bags and wrappers in Central America, or even open fields in the US peppered with plastic pop bottles and greasy fast-food bags. But here, if anything is wrapped, it is wrapped in banana leaves. Most people don’t have latrines so they don’t have toilet paper either – a leaf is used if any cleaning up is needed. And if anyone finds a used magazine or newspaper, they use its pages to paper their mud walls. People are way too poor to buy stuff so there are no fancy wrappers or excessive packaging. People in general do not have cell phones or computers or refrigerators that break and become obsolete and need to be trashed somewhere. There simply isn’t that much garbage in rural Ethiopia. Not yet, anyway.
Most trash that would end up in The Pit is recycled. Not put into blue bins with yellow arrow triangles on them – recycled as in reused. The TB patients in the morning take their pills with water in “cups” that are actually empty medicine containers – multivitamins, albendazole, ferrous sulfate, phenobarbitone, amoxicillin. We wash the tin cans and the jelly jars and potato chip canisters and water bottles reuse them as cups for patients or toys for kids. We use flimsy plastic bags from market as barf-bags for patients on car trips to Jimma (most rural Ethiopians aren’t accustomed to car travel!), and if no one throws up, we use the little bags to hold the fruit that we buy from roadside vendors. Staff members fight over the big Nido powdered milk cans with snap on plastic lids. One perk to being the cleaner or cook at our Big House is having first pick of the nice glass jars and cardboard boxes. Any substantial plastic bags are saved and used to carry food from market, since the food is sold by the kilo and bags are not usually provided. I realized the worth of our used tin cans when I saw similar used cans being sold for profit in the marketplace.
Most of our non-burnable, non-compostable trash is from the clinic. There are two trash baskets in every clinic room, one for burnable things like tongue depressors and used gauze and another for non-burnables like disposable syringes and latex gloves. The disposable cardboard “safety boxes” for sharps like needles and razors are first burned in a barrel to dispose of the bulky cardboard box and to melt down any little plastic pieces, and then the charred remains are dumped in The Pit. I am amazed by the amount of trash that our little clinic creates, until I remember hospitals and clinics in the US, where everything that touches a patient is disposable. Most of our household non-burnable, non-compostable trash is not local – it comes from Addis. Ramon noodle packages, candy-bar wrappers, the foil lining from inside boxes of cornflakes. Even more comes from the United States. What else can we do with the reams of bubble wrap that have accumulated over the years? Old CD’s and DVD’s scratched beyond repair, shiny puzzles with missing (or rat-chewed) pieces, broken flashlights, electronics fried by the 220 volt outlets.
There is no litter in rural Ethiopia. I am accustomed to roadsides strewn with plastic bags and wrappers in Central America, or even open fields in the US peppered with plastic pop bottles and greasy fast-food bags. But here, if anything is wrapped, it is wrapped in banana leaves. Most people don’t have latrines so they don’t have toilet paper either – a leaf is used if any cleaning up is needed. And if anyone finds a used magazine or newspaper, they use its pages to paper their mud walls. People are way too poor to buy stuff so there are no fancy wrappers or excessive packaging. People in general do not have cell phones or computers or refrigerators that break and become obsolete and need to be trashed somewhere. There simply isn’t that much garbage in rural Ethiopia. Not yet, anyway.
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