When I was invited to come out for the day to visit a Maryknoll priest living in the southern zone of Cochabamba, I did not know what I was going to see, but I certainly didn’t anticipate what I encountered. Padre Ken lives in a room of a house in a small neighborhood (“barrio”) right next to the dump for the whole city of Cochabamba. It’s important to set up the context of the southern zone by acknowledging that every ounce of water is shipped in, usually by trucks that collect it in the northern part (where I live) and then sell it to the residents there at about 10x the cost my family pays for water.
The first things I noticed were all the tires and then to the left a nice pond…but wait, that’s not a pond, that’s toxic waste. I was told that there used to be a fence surrounding the dumping ground for the medical waste brought in by the hospitals. One day the fence disappeared and now there’s just some dirt on top and anyone could go through it, not knowing what’s underneath, such as used needles for example.
For a little history, the dump was started 22 years ago, but with no liner, so there is concern about all that waste seeping into the earth, and how is that affecting the water as well? There is one company that collects trash, EMSA, and they work for the mayor. About 8 years ago, people around the dump complained to the mayor about having to deal with the dump and its negative effects, so the mayor is now fined for every ton of trash that is deposited. The mayor pays $0.70 (this is in US dollars) for every ton and it’s estimated at 400 tons/day; excluding Sundays when trash is not collected, that amounts to an average of $87,640 per year that the mayor is fined by the people, and that money can only be accessed by people in 7 of the 33 dictricts.
How do they access that money? The money is kept by the mayor’s office until people can come up with projects on how to spend the money. Someone in Padre Ken’s neighborhood built a water tower and now water can come to individual homes and each person is charged based on their meter’s reading. This is a positive thing, yes. However, do the benefits of having potential access to this money outweigh the costs (I mean this word in a broader sense than strictly economic, such as all the sicknesses the people get because of the dump) of having the dump there in the state that it is in?
Many people want the dump to close and over the years there have been several blockades of garbage trucks, resulting in the littering of the city. Last year some people took the issue to court. The court ordered that the dump be closed by Dec. 31, 2009, but that didn’t happen and still has failed to happen. Therefore, at the beginning of January this year (right about the time I arrived) no trash could be dumped because some people in those districts set up blockades. The sight I saw upon arrival was lots of trash piling up in the streets, sidewalks and medians (I thought it was normal, having never been here before).
There is a foundation, called Vincente Cañas. They have been very vocal about wanting to close the dump, and organized many of those 33 leaders whose districts are near the dump. The 7 leaders closest to the dump (the ones that can access the money) claim that they are the only ones who have the right to control whether the dump should be closed. They have not said outright whether they want the dump to be closed or remain open, but they DO NOT like Vincente Cañas. Those leaders have associated Padre Ken with Vincente Cañas. He’s been “condemned” by several of them in public meetings with people, though not kicked out, which is what happened to the last priest who lived there.
In talking about what some of the major concerns were, the following are a few that Padre Ken mentioned: the lack of a liner in the dump; major health problems and risks; ignorance of the poisons; speculators buying land that is very close to the actual dump, and then convincing people it’s safe to live there.
In college I learned about environmental racism, which Wikipedia defines as “the enactment or enforcement of any policy, practice, or regulation that negatively affects the environment of low-income and/or racially-homogeneous communities at a disparate rate than affluent communities [1]. Environmental racism is either intentional or unintentional racial discrimination and can explain specific incidents in which minority communities are targeted for the siting of polluting industries and factors[2].” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_racism)
I live in the richer part of Cochabamba, which happens to be near the readily available source of water coming out of the northern mountains, but the southern zone, as I mentioned, does not have access to water except by trucks. They also get to bear the brunt of the effects of my trash. Did I mention they’re very poor? It’s pretty clear to me that environmental racism is going on.
I’ll leave you with some questions I’ve been thinking about, and perhaps you can respond to them either to yourself or share your thoughts, because dialogue and collaboration are good things the internet can foster:
1. Where does our trash go, and do you ever think about what happens to it once the convenient truck comes by to take it away?
2. Should we sort our trash and what are the effects if we don’t?
3. What ARE the effects of our trash: health-wise, environmentally, geographically, economically? Who has to deal with those effects most directly?
4. Who makes the decisions surrounding our trash and what resources/technology do we have to deal with it?
5. Those of you who are knowledgeable in areas of waste, water, environmental engineering—if you have any wisdom to share with me to help me better understand the factors, risks, already established systems and technologies, so that I can be more informed, I would really appreciate it!!!
I’ll leave you with something that I think has some aspect of hope to it. I’ve mentioned the “cancha” before, which is a very large area of the city filled with vendors selling everything imaginable, including lots of fresh produce. One concern is that all the produce that the vendors can’t sell and eventually goes bad is thrown away in the dump, when it could (in theory) be going towards compost. Being one who is a MAJOR fan of composting, I was excited to hear Padre Ken’s interest in possibly initiating that effort and we plan to talk more about it in the future. For more pictures, go to http://picasaweb.google.com/nora.pfeiffer/DumpBlog#
Because St. Patrick's Day was this past Wednesday, I was thinking about my time in Ireland and how in love I fell with the nature there in so short a time. Here are three pictures from my time there in 2005, since I try to end things on a good note.
Serene he stands among the flowers
and counts life’s sunny hours
for him dull days do not exist
the brazen faced old optimist
5 Things I’m thankful for: receiving artwork from my cousin Caroline; being able to go to sleep at night; my water bottle; having made it through the first step at the immigration office after several months in the making; having ready-access to water and a stove to boil it so it’s drinkable.
OK Nor, you know me. So my feelings are as follows:
ReplyDelete1) There are three possibilities to human existence: A) My existence benefits you directly and yours benefits me directly (symbiotic) - aka our actual relationship :) or B) My existence naturally hurts your existence, except that a third party such as the government steps in to keep it from being too grossly unfair (example: Me in relation to people in the Bronx...turning an unfair relation into a somewhat fair relation through minimum wage controls, shared school funding, etc) or C) my existence totally hurts your existence just by virtue of circumstance - aka I'm a patient in a hospital and I need a daily shot of insulin to survive, but those needles go into the dump by your house.
2) So the question is (and I didn't see an answer in the blog post...) where are people supposed to put their trash with no dump? Even you, green as you are, can't avoid all trash-production. It's part of being alive. Claiming that all trash production is bad is very Jain - as if I should feel guilty about living because I occasionally unwrap a block of cheese and throw out the plastic wrap, and instead I should just starve. I don't think so.
3) So, sounds like this is a situation where option B is the thing: they need a liner and better governmental controls to allow you to unwrap your cheese without hurting the south side people. BUt I understand how that's not happening anytime soon because of internal disagreements within the govt, various activist groups disagreeing, etc. I'm from Buffalo after all, which is run the exact same way.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that as sad as that trip was, I don't think you can feel guilty about everything you throw away. It's self-defeating.
Because my personal theory is that there's like this Sin Snowball. This is what I call it. So every time any one person does anything slightly harmful to anyone, they're putting a little bit more Sin-Snow on the Sin Snowball. So of course during say 8 zillion years it's gotten pretty big, and occasionally run down entire populations who had nothing more to do with creating it than anyone else, but just happened to be in its path when it got too huge (i.e. genocides, etc.) Meaning, the problem is that Karma doesn't work the way people think it does - what goes around doesn't come around to you - it comes around to someone else. So the evils of the corporate plastic packaging fixation are causing suffering for totally other people! Which sucks and makes good people like you sad and feel guilty.
But it's not your fault! If anything, you're one of the only people who can chip away at the Sin Snowball with your...um...Virtue Mittens! Because I'm also convinced that people like you, who use your Virtue Mittens often, can break up the Sin Snowball (almost imperceptibly) til it can't crush people anymore.
[And if you didn't like those tortured metaphors, blame it on the Figure Of Speech Weeds that grow in the Garden of Literary Endeavor... :) ]
love you nor!
Caroline - If you have a mitten, but it's not a Virtue Mitten, does that make it a "Bad-mitten"..... (sorry, couldn't resist!)
ReplyDelete; )
in re: environmental 'racism' -- When one uses the term 'racism' one presupposes (does one not?) a diversity of race or ethnicity, not merely economics, class or other non-race/ethnic differences? While I imagine that the poorer part of the city has a higher proportion of people who are more closely tied to the aboriginal population of Bolivia, while the northern part of the city might have a higher proportion of people more closely tied to colonial settlers, you do not assert this (or even imply it).
ReplyDeleteI don't think, for example, that if you have a 100% homogeneous population that you can call it environmental 'racism', although by your definition it would appear to be so. Likewise, if the population of the dump area is substantially similar in its ethnic composition and proportions to that of the northern area, though poorer, I can't agree with labeling this 'racism'.
Caroline seemed to lay out the basics of the situation: There is always a need to dump trash. The question, of course, is how do we do it with least adverse impact and at the lowest cost in terms of disruption to/ tax on other human activities? Of course, the forgotten part of the cost equation for most of human history was the long term detrimental effect of the dumping.
OTOH: In India now there is a problem where the government has essentially killed an age old cottage industry of re-use/ recycling by limiting the ability of the dump residents to pick through the trash...