Recycling Poverty

This morning, as I was walking to work, I passed a young girl pulling a small, make-shift wooden cart on wheels. She is a girl I have seen before in my neighbourhood, often in the mornings. I have seen other children like her – young boys who walk through the streets in pairs, often with wooden boxes on wheels, or one very young boy who comes alone with his plastic bag. For those who tug along wheeled boxes behind them, it is obvious the materials – the axles, the wheels, the slats of wood – are all second- or third- or fourth-hand, and have been pulled together from a variety of sources.

I live in a pretty nice neighbourhood in La Ceiba: one of the nicer ones. The streets are wide and clean; there are no shops or comedors; the houses are sturdy, with gated patios, attractive gardens, and barking dogs; some houses have additions and second floors, which make them quite large. There is also a pick-up truck with several uniformed security guards that makes its way around the neighbourhood throughout the day and night.

Each street in my neighbourhood has several plastic bins or metal cages where we deposit our garbage to be picked up by the municipal truck. There are no blue bins to deposit materials for recycling that so many in North America are accostomed to using. I have been living in Ceiba for many months now, and still have a very hard time not separating my garbage. After years of having separate bins for paper, tin cans, plastic bottles, and organic waste, it pains me to put a big glass bottle or a newspaper in the same bag as vegetable peelings and plastic wrappers. So my roommate and I do separate our garbage a little: putting cans and bottles in a separate bag.

We make these feeble efforts of separating garbage in the hopes that, in some very small way, this will lighten the work-day of these children that come to our neighbourhood. You see, these kids wander our streets to sort through the garbage, and remove what can be recycled.

There are some recycling facilities in La Ceiba – facilities that pay a small fee to those who bring in recyclables. I don’t know much about these recycling facilities: who owns and manages the facilities, how much they pay for the materials brought to them in plastic bags or cardboard boxes, or even where they are located. I haven’t been to a recycling facility, but I have been to the Ceiba dump: a huge hill off the highway heading east, surrounded by small barrios (neighbourhoods) of make-shift houses with piles of big, old, rusty metal materials (pieces of cars, box-springs, pieces of old appliances, etc) out front. Before arriving at the gate of the dump, several dozen people sort through piles of garbage.

I don’t know about the lives of these children: if they go to school, what other activities fill their days, if they are happy. I always try to smile and say a few words, but the distance between us is too great to bridge to develop comfort and open conversations.

I also don’t know what to do with the swirl of emotions and thoughts that flare up when I see these children. It can be so easy to become complacent in our daily lives: to engage with our social, home, and work worlds without often looking beyond our daily activities. Yet when I see these children - who try to make a few lempiras off the garbage I produce - I trip over my day-to-day tasks and stumble over my regular walking-to-work daydreams, and am confronted by a mix of emotions and reflections. How my life and the little girl’s life are connected; how the things that I have in my house, and where I live, are connected to the things she has in her house, and where she lives; what role the daily tasks I give little thought to affect her life; how we each came to be walking to our respective “jobs”; the links, interplay, and connections between my life and hers. Many of the emotions that accompany such reflections - such as hopelessness, helplessness, or guilt - are not very useful and do not facilitate change, nor do they make a difference for the little girl I passed this morning. Yet I must have hope that the reflections, and some of the emotions - such as anger or sadness - are somehow beneficial; that my own efforts to look at my own life, and the world I live in, will help motivate or inspire me to continue to push and live for change.