Trash Talk

Feb 4

I wrote a page in my journal during the first week in Chapagaon, concerning my concerns about the trash situation here in Nepal.  From that point, it has been interesting to observe within myself the transitions in emotion and perception surrounding the topic of trash.  From a Western perspective, Nepal is, literally, littered.  There is trash everywhere, the places free from it are mostly the agricultural fields, but even then you may find a stray plastic bag trampled into the worn, narrow path. 

And so.  Here are my feelings from almost a month ago.

Jan 15

Smita (one of the clinic workers) took Seven and I on a walk today, through Chapagaon and its streets, and to a cafe, and then back to the clinic through fields of young fava beans, and flowering wild mustard.  It’s still dusty here in the village, but the diesel fumes are less and so the dust is simply dusty and not sticky-dusty, as it is in the city.

Smita shed some light on what I have termed for myself “the trash situation” as we walked past small ponds, greyish-brown murk with a thin fluorescent green algae bloom towards on end.  She explained that it was not always this way, that when she was a child, twenty years ago, these ponds and canals were clean and clear.  It’s not so hard to imagine how beautiful this place must have been, it’s quite beautiful now.  But the plastic, of every imaginable color, litters every block, every embankment, every edge of beautiful green field, a huge disappointment at the state of the environment here for me, a softie for the earth and easily triggered by lack of care for it. 

I remember the anti-“litterbug” campaign of my own early childhood, and the advent of yellow metal trashcans on every street corner around town.  I remember also, in the sixth grade, our teacher talking about Tenney lagoon and how it used to be a swimspot, the water crystal clear, you could see to the bottom.  Not saturated in a rainbow of plastic trash, like the Vishnumati or the Bagmati Rivers, that run through Kathmandu, but saturated with algae, seaweed and lilypads due to the unregulated Wisconsin farm-water runoff.  The concept of a crystal clear Tenney Park lagoon was about as conceivable as martians joining us for volleyball at the beach.  So my thoughts and questions about my own country, before the yellow trashcan invasion, which provided a constant reminder to us to ‘Keep Clean!’ our city:  did this type of thing ever happen  when every sort of plastic packaging for any sort of good first came on the market?  Was “disposable” considered by the majority of our population as game for simply tossing to the side of the road?  And finally, the fact that we have mechanisms set up to collect, consolidate, and “dispose” of this plastic, among other things (i.e. put them out of site, cover them up etc. etc.) doesn’t make it go away now, does it? 

 

I consider plastic one of the greatest tragedies of the 20^th century.  

In any case.  Smita did not allude to either negative nor positive feelings over the matter, but my heart breaks as I think of our globalized economy and witness first-hand what it is doing to the towns and cities of Nepal. 

Their solution?

But it's interesting, the longer I am here, the less I see the trash.  It blends into the landscape.  And I wonder, is it complacency, or coping?  Or is it the sense of Buddhist impermanence?  Although majority Hindu, Buddhism pervades and mingles amongst the Nepali character.  If I am empty, so is the world, and the trash that I see with my mind is only a concept, created by the idea itself.  If I don't see it, is it really there?