Trash

Yesterday I spent the whole day in a tro-tro on my way back from Cape Coast to Hohoe.

Tro-tro stations are crowed, noisy and dusty. We must look for the tro-tro that heads our final destination and enter. We wait until it’s full and when that happens we leave. While we wait inside the tro-tro lots of people sell food through the tro-tro’s windows.

I had been curious for a while to try fried plantain so I bought it - it’s quite similar to chips but with plantain instead. I ate it and in the end when I was going to put the plastic bag inside my backpack to later put it in a trash can the guy next to me, who had been trying to handle a conversation, hold the plastic bag, throw it to the tro-tro’s floor and said:

-          Don´t put it in your backpack; put it the floor – they’ll pick up latter.

-          No! – I grabbed the plastic bag and put it in my backpack – I’ll put it here and when I get home I’ll put it in a trash can.

-          Why? They will pick it up later.

That’s when I thought “right, and then they will just throw it somewhere on the floor like everyone always does here”.

-          How would you do if you have something liquid?

-          If it was back home I would put it in a trash can because they are all over. Here I would do the exact same thing – I showed him that I also had a water bag inside another plastic bag.

-          Hum… ok, I understand – He didn´t seen that much convinced.

I can count the number of trash bins I have seen around – most of them are in touristic places. Usually people just throw the trash away so it’s all over; I even saw it at the beach in Cape Coast which is quite sad because the place is really beautiful.

Some people (the more educated ones from what I understood) keep it at home and then burn it usually either early in the morning or later in the evening – we can smell it quite often.

From what heard there is one trash company but when I asked Anita (the cook) she said she didn´t know of anything. Probably it operates only in Accra; but I’m not sure.

I can now see the importance of education even on the things I used to take as granted – I never actually thought about the fact that I (and the rest of the country) was educated to put the trash in trash bins; it’s like there is not even another way of doing it; it’s automatic.

07/08/2012