Thanks again, your insight has helped me to better see this issue from a Central American and even global perspective, and that is invaluable.

I thought I would “do my part” to pick up a few fistfuls of garbage within a 20 foot radius. I put them in plastic bags that I found stuck in some bushes. When we hiked out I noticed that a few of my friends had picked up the trash, contained within a few bags and for the moment I considered it a capacity-building job well-done on my part: “Maybe I inspired them” I thought.

After we had hiked out of the valley, my friends asked me what I wanted to do with the trash. “Well, I thought we could dispose of it in the trash can.” They reminded me that they didn’t have a trash service, and that the best way to dispose of trash was to throw it down the hillside, which is what they proceeded to do. I was taken back at first. “What do you mean you don’t have a trash service. Don’t they care about the environment?” I snubbed.

I later realized my naivete, and how my North Americanized ideals of environmentalism wouldn’t do for the complex problems of trash disposal in a poor country. It turned out they literally didn’t have a trash service! They couldn’t afford it. If a family lived on top of a hill, their backyard became their landfill. This was commonplace as I met more families. Many families didn’t had enough money to adequately feed and educate their children, let alone pay for trash service. When the trash pile grew too high, they would burn it. These dominate my memories of Nicaragua: The sight of plastic bags and smell of burning trash.

In one of the poorest countries in the western hemisphere, I saw how the lack of environmental policies stemmed from poverty and corruption in Nicaragua, not because the people didn’t care about the environment. For many poor farmers I worked with, recycling for them was using the plastic trash as firestarter to fuel their stoves. This cut down on the amount of trash they had to pay to be serviced. For us, we abhor this image and lament the pollution that burning plastic causes. But their system worked for them. It was a system fueled by their poverty: the lack of education and the dearth of money to have a good trash and recycling program.

We take things for granted in the US, where we have so many opportunities to reduce, recycle and reuse. Al’s blog points out the incredible amount of waste we generate in the US that only increases during these months. We have to start with ourselves. So BYOB works for me. Taking responsibility for my own baggage is something I can do. And with every bag that I remember to take with me to the grocery store, I recall one house I visited at the edge of the Managuan dump, which people called “La Chureca”. The family made their living washing plastic bags that they scavenged from the dump. They hung them out in the sun on the clotheslines to dry, and sold them in the market. This was their livelihood. Through their hard work, the family takes trash, cleans it, and recycles it by reinvesting it into the local economy. A great photography slide show about La Chureca can be viewed at http://www.lachurecaexhibit.com/ — a powerful vignette of people who work every day in the dump, Nicaragua’s recyclers.