So it hasn’t been easy, but between the faux busyness and the real business I’ve done a damn good job of not writing (but once) in the last 31 days. I’ve succeeded enormously in not writing about our amazing week in the Italian countryside, now down to its last drops in my memory just as we finished the last drops of our artisanal amazing aromatic olive oil we carried with us, straight from the presser’s hands in Civitta di Bagnoreggio.

I’ve also done a great job – if I do say so myself – in not producing the little audio segments I’ve been assembling out of bleating goats, coughing generators, laughing children, frying chiles, and various other aurals and ends that decorate our West African existence. I haven’t pounded out lengthy complaints and analyses of power dynamics among the different ethnicities, classes, and stati here, though I’m often going over it in my head. I haven’t spent any time on the Humanitarian Industry and what a disaster its existence is in many ways (perhaps fitting, because its non-existence was and would also be another set of disasters). And I certainly haven’t bitched in written form about US AID contractors furnishing themselves 3,000 USD apartments with taxpayer money and then winking and clinking glasses over it.

So I suppressed writing about meeting my neighborhood kids and even the neighborhood farmers (Alfred and Clinton, who are awesome), about running with my new friends on the beach and listening to their songs. I even didn’t make time to write when I was applying for consultancies with the aforementioned Humanitarian Industry, and neither when I got the jobs I wanted (I am now a sort of West African Desktop GIS specialist and Agricultural Training Manual Designer, á la fois).

But here I am,

on the balcony

in the rain,

with sugary juice

and the sweet fragrance

of burning plastic in my system.

And the thing I can’t not write about anymore is the little girl I just meant. I don’t remember her name (I’m terrible with Liberian names so far, I can’t understand why, perhaps it’s true that I’m getting older) but she was small and wearing a green dress (maybe it’s called a frock) and had no shoes and was dragging a plastic garbage can as large as she was, away from my “compound” (the 10 foot high wall that surrounds this three-story cement house, looking over the beach, the Atlantic, the Chinese embassy, and a score of abandoned unpainted concrete buildings that, I have learned, are not-at-all abandoned).

I see the little green girl dragging the big green plastic garbage can and I’ve got nothing to do so I offer to help her and she accepts. I haven’t seen her before and assuming she is a neighborhood kid getting some water or something for her mother. The “abandoned” buildings are probably innocent of running war, so it’s not such a strange idea to get from the neighboring “bossman” compound. But we go past the first inhabited ruins and down a small gully, cross a road, and start heading down a worn path through the bush. I haven’t seen any houses that way – I know the lagoon is up ahead soon – and am curious to find out where she, and I guess we, are going.

But it isn’t until we right up to a stinking pile of plastic and scraps do I understand that we’re not carrying water in the green garbage can but we’re actually a funny not-black man and a small green black girl carrying garbage. I release the can, she tosses off the lid, overturns the contents, and says “Thank you”. I am too taken with seeing the remnants of my way of life to respond.

The same plastics, bottles, wrappers, and food scraps that I haven’t pushed my “family” (6-8 expatriate United States citizens wrapped up in the now-famous Humanitarian Industry) to separate, reduce, or more efficiently dispose of, now right in front of my eyes, and under the bare feet of this small green black frocked girl.

We fed the food scraps to the downstairs neighbor’s goat until they ate it three weeks ago. Now it’s all just a big mess. I save some of the seeds to plant, and reuse all the good plastic bags, and save the beer bottles for local kids who want them, and try to reuse the juice bottles for spice containers. But you wouldn’t guess it from looking at this pile of rubbish, rapidly decomposing and toxifying, at the edge of this local lagoon where my neighbors fish and bathe.

So there’s that. A moment for that. Please, just a moment.

And a strengthened awareness of the immediacy and power of a zero-waste lifestyle, how “humanitarian” it could be for this little girl’s life, and my own. Tonight, enshallah, Kate and I are moving into a new home, just 200 meters away, bordering the same lagoon. I am prepared to reuse, upcycle, save, compost, and burn anything I need to, but I don’t want another piece of my consumer lifestyle to touch the hands or feet of that little girl.

Of course, the only real solution to the Trash Issue is through developing the consciousness that “There is no such thing as away”. “Away” is a fiction. We are throwing our garbage onto other creatures: human creatures, animal creatures, plant creatures, soil creates, planet creatures. There is no away that’s not somebeing‘s home.

okay. Not so cheery. And I’m not even going to make the time to get into a harangue about how REDUCTION (not induction) is the only solution, because I’m going to make some popcorn for my home-coming lover, and dress it with tahini (whose plastic container I will use to store fresh peanut butter from the local market).

one love through it all,

ankur