Sat: Today we went to a play that HOPAC did. HOPAC is a school in Dar es Salaam that some of the interns are volunteering at. The kids did the Sound of Music and it was really good. Maria, the woman that cleans and cooks at the Guest House came with us and she really enjoyed it. On our way home we stopped for gas and we all got free shirts that say “I Love Jesus”, it was random they were at the gas station, but all the employees were wearing them so we asked if we could have one and they were actually excited to give them to us! So now I have a clean shirt to wear to bed, haha!
Sun: As soon as I got to Dar es Salaam I noticed the abundance of garbage that was always on the ground, but over the weeks I’ve also noticed the casual nature that people here litter. I’ve always been one to be bugged by witnessing others litter in Canada and probably because it’s been engrained in my thinking that littering is bad and wrong because it is against the law and condoned. But here, everyone litters and there’s no sanitation system in place to clean it up so it generally just accumulates in the street. Since there’s no law against littering and no one actively works at cleaning it up, I believe it’s just an accepted thing to do. I’m not stating that they like the waste, I believe they would really appreciate an organization that had productive waste management and made a difference by cleaning up the streets, I’m just saying that it’s a cycle of the lack of government initiative, lack of a difference that one individual could make by picking up their garbage, and an increasing norm to litter and/or just ignore the large amounts of garbage accumulating on the streets.
This short article gives an insider’s perspective of the extent of garbage in Dar es Salaam and some of the main reasons for why it is there and why it’s not getting any better. The companies organizing waste removal are ineffective and the workers they employ are burdened with irregular and unreliable work. Workers are paid less than $2 a day to pick up garbage and they aren’t provided the protective tools they need to keep safe and clean. “Each municipality within the city produces between 530 and 2,000 tonnes of waste each day, but less than half is picked up and delivered to an official disposal site. This means that over the course of any given year, the communities of Dar es Salaam are choked by more than 323,000 tonnes of uncollected trash”. This quote from the above article puts the extent of this problem into perspective and it’s no wonder Dar es Salaam is one of Forbes filthiest cities. Something needs to be done on the large/governmental scale to combat this garbage epidemic.
Tonight a couple of us made some cookies! Its nice to know we can cook now and the Father brought us a bunch of bowls and more cooking utensils! We made oatmeal and fresh coconut cookies, they ended up being so good. It was really funny opening the coconuts though because we weren’t sure how we were going to and then Jen ended up throwing one on the floor and it cracked open but we weren’t expecting it too and coconut juice sprayed everywhere and we all screamed like we were getting murdered, haha, it was pretty hilarious…but also unsettling that our Masai didn’t even come to check on us to see what had happened J
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