Hilary Robertson-Hickling
WE HAVE made a mess and we have to clean it up ourselves. This is not to say that others have not helped to create this situation but the toxicity and unpleasantness is killing us and affecting us and our wellbeing. We behave like we have a class of people who come around to clean up after us but we are the garbage men and women; uptown, downtown, big business and small man.
Some years ago I visited a showplace garbage dump in Germany and it was as clean as a whistle. In that country there are very strict laws about recycling and garbage disposal. You do not see people littering the street.
PSYCHOLOGY OF PEOPLE
Some will say it has to do with the psychology of a people who are supposed to be obsessed with cleanliness. To follow that logic is to suggest that as Jamaicans we seem to have a great deal of ambivalence about garbage. How else can we explain a group of people who pride themselves on their own cleanliness while criticising others who are nasty or unclean.
It is now 31 years ago that I taught at a secondary school in a rural parish capital. We took a group of tenth grade students on an outing to Dunn's River Falls and then to Ocho Rios. We had forgotten to make our expectations about the disposal of garbage clear to them. After purchasing and consuming their lunches at fast food restaurants, the students routinely threw their refuse on the main street in Ocho Rios. The teachers who had organised the outing had to instruct the students to pick up every bit of litter on the street and to place the rubbish in a proper receptacle.
MARGINAL IMPROVEMENT
Things have improved only marginally as in spite of more information being available and more campaigns being waged in the media, all sorts of rubbish is disposed of from cars and buses; human waste is routinely disposed of in improper places. Gullies are full of filth and animals roam freely in the rubbish in Papine and across the markets of the country.
We are very fortunate to have escaped the major health problems associated with poor solid waste disposal. Indeed, much of the solid waste management in this country is scandalous although we have the knowledge resident in this country. What is the matter? Is it the absence of political will, or is it that we just don't care?
Will it take a major epidemic or an expose on CNN for us to address the dirt and grime that is everywhere? Have we lost sight of ourselves and our environment?
When will we recognise that we have to recycle that which can be recycled, to make compost where possible and to ensure that we clean up after ourselves? Many of the fires that get out of control in this dry season are the result of inappropriate garbage disposal. The increase in the consumption of fast food provides containers for dumping everywhere and when this is exacerbated by bins which are not emptied regularly and the army of stray dogs who roam the streets hungry, we have a recipe for a disaster.
Where tips are placed they now receive dead men, and drums are regularly stolen if holes are not put in them. I pray that the new Prime Minister will declare Labour Day 'Clean up your own backyard Day' and encourage the country to keep itself clean. "Bits of paper, bits of paper lying on the ground, lying on the ground, make the place untidy, make the place untidy. Pick them up."
Hilary Robertson-Hickling is a lecturer in the Department of Management Studies, UWI, Mona.
