Picking trash

Granada city Nicaragua is somewhat disconnected from the real situation in the rest of the country. It is a tourist town, and there is a pedestrian centre with amenities almost exclusively for tourists. By this I mean that there are many cafes but few shops (except ones selling drinks). The cafes are expensive, and they advertise ´no ice!´ to reassure illness-conscious tourists. Men squat with paintbrushes at the base of propped-up canvasses in the evening half dark: with such conditions, it is not surprising the paintings are not particularly good. (The prints displayed nearby and produced by the several printmaking workshops are generally very good.)  There is almost a division between the many white (and Hispanic) tourists and the locals in these streets, and I´m not surprised since the cost of a meal is much more than in other eateries where I have enjoyed some beans and rice and steamed emerald green squash.

Some vignettes:

In Ocotal, a vendor of flower pots had his wares set out and was sleeping in a hammock behind his wares on a busy corner of the Pan-American highway, his abode until he sells the pots he bought and brought to this corner. After that, he will go home, or perhaps he will repeat the cycle of bringing a cartload of huge flower pots from the town known for them, and selling them by the Pan American highway.

A man got on the bus from Managua to Grenada yesterday with a arm that was broken and never reset, so he had a 30 degree bend in his lower arm. The arm was wrapped in a compression bandage, but this could only cover this skin – the arm was clearly always mended at the wrong angle. He told his story, including being alone – having no parents and no family to help him through this hard time – and some passengers gave him a bit of money. On the streets, older people sometimes ask for money for food. Children sometimes point at games, begging for the money to play.

This morning, I saw a boy of about 11 or 12 with a curly mop of black hair sleepily blinking his eyes, clearly having just woken up. He was sitting on a mat of several flattened cardboard boxes in a pedestrian square in Grenada, Nicaragua. Yesterday, I noticed in the tourist centre of Granada, a boy of about 7 or 8 was napping in the midday heat, facedown on a stone step along a road in town. And a thin woman with short hair also on a stone step. These people are often picking through the trash during the day, picking out things that can be sold, such a scrap metal, and picking out food. This rather shocking work, done by the poorest people, may seem to be a third world phenomenon, but in fact in Europe, the recyclables are also picked through and sorted by people. And we need more of it: we need to discard less and recycle more, so we will need trash pickers more. We cannot all be prosperous and casually throwing things away; the earth will not sustain this dream lifestyle any more.

More than half of the North Americans in the group I recently toured Nicaragua with, left clothes and shoes behind when they left. On the surface, this appears to the generosity, but in fact it is not. Generosity depends on knowing what people need, and giving from the heart. This was dumping. Some of the people who left clothes were of a very different size that Nicaraguans, so finding the right recipient might be hard.

But dumping clothes says they are of no value. It says the person dumping either didn´t need them or can replace them easily. This indicates that clothes are too cheap in North America. I say this because some of the clothes dumped were made of cotton – a crop grown with huge amounts of pesticides and water, making it very costly in terms of environmental resources. They were sewn by skilled worked, possibly in a sweat shop such as those plentiful in parts of Nicaragua. These workers were presumably not paid adequately, as, if they had been, the clothes would not be cheap enough to dump without a thought. And, finally, dumping clothes (not giving them) is almost a sign of disrespect : assuming people here locally will make use of what the North Americans don´t want any more. That it is true that the oversized clothes will probably be re-sized, that the cotton is great for this hot climate, and that people indeed probably have so little a free shirt is welcome, does not take away from the fact that dumping clothes demonstrates the inequality in this world without addressing it.