A warning: the more earth friendly among you may find this entry disturbing. If you find descriptions of your friends performing environmentally unsavory acts unpleasing, you may want to avert your eyes for the following paragraphs.
Okay, that’s only kind of a joke. Many of you know that I was far from the greenest person you know when I was living in the US, but I did my best. I could never quite escape my addiction to giant Diet Cokes and chocolate chip cookies from McDonald’s. (It is, after all, the perfect snack for only $1.49.) I did, however, make and effort to show a little love to our Earth. We do only get one, so as Brian Gurley would say, I appreciate things like NOT plastic bags. Plus, being green is kind of a little cool in the US, and I am nothing if not kind of a little cool. I mean, even my parents recycle these days.
Well, the green wave has not yet hit Togo. Here, everything you’d ever want to buy and a lot of things you don’t come in little black plastic bags. When you are finished with whatever was in the bag (likely more bags), you have two options: you can throw it on the ground where you stand (the more popular choice) or you can take it home to throw it away in your trash can. Of course, if you are me, you are likely to realize that you have been exercising option two for three weeks or so, and the weekly collection doesn’t seem to be happening, so there is a moderately sized mound forming in the corner of your room. What does one do with said mound? Easy. You burn it.
Now, while I didn’t find this practice particularly appealing at first, I figured there are really only so many battles a person can fight at once. If I’m going to fight the family planning and nutrition battles, I might just have to leave the burning plastic and Styrofoam fight for the next guy. And, I cannot lie; part of me expected to feel a certain liberation in watching everything I didn’t want anymore going up in smoke, in being decidedly un-green. SPOILER ALERT. This dream did not come to fruition.
The truth is I have been nervous about burning my trash since I got here. They told us that trash is a very personal thing here, so you should try to burn it in private. I live in a host family with seven other people, so privacy is not really a possibility, but earlier this week, my host parents were away for a couple of hours, so it was just me, three of my sisters and my niece at home. I don’t know how much more private it gets. I asked my 14 year old sister where the family burned their trash, and she immediately became interested. This was unfortunate for my privacy wish but what can you do? Visitor trash is big news in my little village, and it quickly became a family affair. We carefully covered everything with the kerosene I had purchased that morning, and I lit a match. We all watched in anticipation as nothing happened. The match just went out. I lit another match. Nothing. More kerosene and six more matches later, still nothing. At this point, my host sister picked up the bottle of kerosene and smelled it. Then, to my horror, she took a drink and proclaimed it not kerosene at all but “bizarre water.”
My sisters were livid. I told them that I had just purchased the kerosene in town, and they couldn’t believe the vendor would take advantage of a visitor. In a matter of seconds everybody, including the baby, was ready for a showdown downtown. Fortunately, I had a moment of insight. I picked up the kerosene and tasted it to discover that it was, in fact, neither kerosene but Crystal Lite Peach Mango Green Tea, which I had mixed up after lunch to help mask the bleach in my water. Tasty. I meekly called off the confrontation and produced the actual kerosene, which, in my defense, looked exactly the same. (They are both stored in a big used water bottle.) I think my family cannot believe how completely inept I am.
So we took a second stab at burning everything, which proved even more difficult now that I had doused everything in water, but the six year old had fun lighting match after match in the attempt. (It is okay to let Kindergarteners play with matches here because even they can burn their own trash without incident.) The whole affair wasn’t finished for two hours, giving the rest of the family plenty of time to come home and laugh at me. At least they still find me entertaining. At post, I think I’ll just bury my trash. In the meantime, I’m coloring the kerosene bottle red.
To my family:
Have a great vacation. I wish I could be with you, but I am thinking about all of you, and I love you very much!
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