Neem Hakeem: Garbage and IV Tubing
Garbage in Senegal (Flickr CC License)
The story out of Senegal is absolutely horrifying. A seven year old boy drowns in a garbage bog – that should be enough, but the story goes on to explain that the boy’s entire neighborhood is built on garbage. A swampy area outside of Dakar, Senegal’s capital, Guédiawaye is pretty much built on garbage from the greater Dakar metropolitan area. It’s not that the rest of the population is using this area as a dump – no, the story is stranger than that. In fact, the residents here actually buy the garbage to use as building material:
Garbage, packed down tight and then covered with a thin layer of sand, is used to raise the floors of houses that flood regularly in the brief but intense summer rainy season, and it is packed into the dusty streets that otherwise become canals. The water lingers for months in the low-lying terrain of this bone-dry country.
Garbage is a surrogate building material, a critical filler to deal with the stagnant water — cheap, instantly accessible and never diminishing. The plastic-laden spillover from these foul-smelling deliveries pokes up through the sandy lots, covers the ground between the crumbling cinder-block houses, becomes grazing ground for goats, playground for barefoot, runny-nosed children and breeding ground for swarms of flies. Disease flourishes here, aid groups say: cholera, malaria, yellow fever and tuberculosis. (NYTimes)
The boy who drowned did so because the garbage he was playing on turned out to be floating in water he couldn’t see.
The obvious question here is, ‘Why???’ Why would people, already desperately poor, pay scarce cash for the questionable privilege of taking possession of a cartload of garbage and using it as material in their homes?
The obvious answer is, they have little choice. Like most human beings, these folks are making a rational choice between several bad options. Surely they know garbage is a poor building material at best. That much of the disease they face regularly comes from – or at least grows worse because of – the garbage in which they live. They almost certainly do not know what toxins from the plastic and other chemicals in the garbage is doing to them and to their children, damage to their bodies that they cannot see, but will experience in cancer and other environmental diseases – if they live long enough.
And that’s the tradeoff: They are choosing to take the risks associated with garbage because these seem less immediate than the risk of living with, or in, the water that floods their neighborhood regularly.
We do the same thing, though. My wife recently had major surgery at the University of Wisconsin Hospital in Madison, surely one of the most advanced medical centers in the world. And I was struck almost immediately at how difficult it is to be an environmentalist in a hospital: Everything is disposable, from the IV tubing going into her arm to the plastic and foil that every single pill is packaged in. Energy – a hospital is one enormous energy vacuum. We had no need of radioactive materials for our treatment or diagnosis (I don’t think we did, anyway) but I know there’s plenty of radioactivity in certain parts of this medical complex. Even the cafeteria is drowning in Styrofoam. All of these represent significant hazards and risks – short term in the volume of waste that has to be disposed of every single day, long term in the contribution of this complex, and the thousands of others like it, to climate change, accumulation of hazardous waste, and so on and on and on.
But we put it up with it. Why? For the same reason that the residents of Guédiawaye purchase garbage: The perceived benefits (controlling infection with disposable tubing, for example) seem greater than the possible risks. It’s a short term solution that, unfortunately, is no more sustainable than the choices being made in that slum in Senegal.
What might this have to do with “God-centered and green”? Honestly, I’m not sure. Except that the choices we have to make between risk now and risk later, or benefits now and risk later, or some other combination are so complicated and difficult that I can’t see how we can make these choices without God’s help. Ultimately, of course, the solution is to work our way – okay, pray our way – toward a world in which such choices aren’t necessary. A world in which even the poorest in the world will be able to have, or to build houses that are clean and safe and healthy. A world in which there is a lot less garbage because we have learned how to make stuff that can be remade without generating waste. And yes, a world in which a hospital is in fact a healthy place that not only offers the benefits of healing our diseases, but does so in a way that actually heals the land and the community in which it is placed.
This is a tall order, and as much as anything else you could dedicate your life to, it would truly be serving the Lord to be involved in creating such a world. Let’s do it together!
[Cross-posted at http://sustainlane.com)
Tags: Garbage, Neem Hakeem, Senegal
