This evening, on November 7th, I had my first trash disposal incident. I had been warned, but I didn’t quite expect this. I had heard horror stories of volunteers coming home to find children playing with feminine products on their fingers like Edward Scissorhands. Katie, my neighbor, had had her trash bag ripped out of her hands to then watched the children tear the bag apart in the middle of a cornfield. But I am lucky, I have a burning pit for my trash.
My burning pit is a cement square that comes about waist high. It had filled up with water during the rainy season and I just noticed yesterday that it had finally dried up, creating the first time since at site that I could actually use it. It was just before dusk and “burn trash” was the last thing on my to-do list for the week. I had been putting it off because there was a crowd of children at my house all afternoon and I didn’t want them to get any ideas, but then in a moment of weakness I thought maybe they were too distracted by the American magazines I had given them to notice me. Plus my trash bags were the black plastic bags that are used for everything here, and didn’t exactly scream “I’m full of trash”. I was wrong. As soon as I walked out of the house with the bags I caught their attention. One girl took one of my bags out of my hand as I walked to the burning pit. She tends to insist on helping me do everything I may be doing- laundry, dishes, sweeping- and she seemed to be rather calm as she walked with me so I thought she may just want to carry the bag for me. Then a little boy hopped up and sat on the edge of the burning pit, feet dangling in, and asked for my second bag of trash. I thought maybe for a second he was going to help me, show me the proper way to burn trash. Kids get really excited to burn things is the states, why wouldn’t they get excited here as well? He immediately dumped out the bag and then hopped into the pit and started rummaging. Instantly there were 4 other children in the pit with him and several leaning in over the sides, they ascended on the trash like vultures. Oh no, I thought, this is my worst nightmare. Wrappers and plastic bags were flying everywhere as they tore threw the trash like ravenous animals. There was one little boy who kept asking me what everything was, or was from- a potato chip bag, cardboard from the fry pan my grandmother sent me, even the wrapper from a pad. They found old tuna cans and literally started to lick them clean. One of my favorite girls found the wrapper from the parmesan cheese my grandmother had sent and turned it inside out and was licking it- now I finished that cheese about 3 weeks ago, making that cheese residue almost a month old. Some of the stuff in the bag had been their since my first week at site- about 70 days ago! Great, I’m going to get the children sick. They are going to get food poisoning from my trash.
Power bar wrappers were licked spotless. Any food wrapper was considered a bonbon. The cheese covering from baby belles was chewed like gum. Tin tuna cans were taken. One girl was especially pleased over a dead pen. An old and very dirty toothbrush cover, which I had used on my toothbrush for everyday for 4 months, was literally fought over. Plastic and pieces of cardboard from packaging were taken. It was incredible.
After about 10 to 15 minutes and me saying “ok, ce fini!” several times, I finally got them to stop and get out of my trash pit. As soon as all body parts were out of the way I started lighting it on fire for fear that they would try to grab out another treasure. Just as I started the fire a mother came by and looked on for a minute. I’m fairly positive if it wasn’t already light she might have dug in to see what she could find as well.
While the children ran home with their goodies, hiding them for each other so nothing would be stolen from them, I spent the next 5 minutes walking around my yard picking up all the trash they had thrown out and about. Needless to say, next time I will wait until no one is near my house to bring out the trash.
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