Trash. Rubbish. Garbage. Litter. Waste. Latin America has it all. In abundance. Anyone who's visited this part of the world knows what I'm talking about. One of my first cultural shocks I received on my first trip to Latin America was on my first bus ride out of Managua. Several passengers had bought sodas in a bag (literally, soda poured into a plastic bag) for the trip. And when the bag was empty, the passengers leisurely tossed them out the window to let them mingle with other discarded bags. Cringe !
But my most recent shock was in Barranquilla, on the Colombian Caribbean coast. Driving through the city, we passed a canal, called the Pumpkin Canal, which was linked through a series of canals to the Magdalena River. But this canal was an interesting composition of one part water and three parts trash. The layer of plastic, paper, glass, and rotting food bobbed up and down with the wind. Like a Colombian Cuyahoga. If you're not American or if younger than 40 years old, you may be unfamiliar with the Cuyahoga River. It's a river in Ohio that is infamous for catching on fire in the 1960's...several times.
The US, the country where rivers burn, produces more trash than any other nation. But it usually does a damn fine job of hiding it all. It's no Switzerland, but the plastic bags on the side of the road are few and far between. Latin America produces less trash, but lets it all hang out. If there's a hand-painted "No Littering Here" sign on a wall, below it you'll find, without exception, 14 bags of trash, half of them torn open and dispersed by the roving dogs. Some kind of reverse psychology going on here... I'm thinking of painting the sign "Whatever you do, don't place your gold and diamonds here" on a wall and then waiting around the corner.
And if this were Nebraska or the Murmansk Oblast, nobody'd be complaining. But there's far too much beauty here between all the mountains and the beaches and the plains and the rainforest to let it be marred by styrofoam and plastic. I can only hope that, like the fires on the Cuyahoga River, Barranquilla's dump canal will spur the people's inner environmentalists into action.
But my most recent shock was in Barranquilla, on the Colombian Caribbean coast. Driving through the city, we passed a canal, called the Pumpkin Canal, which was linked through a series of canals to the Magdalena River. But this canal was an interesting composition of one part water and three parts trash. The layer of plastic, paper, glass, and rotting food bobbed up and down with the wind. Like a Colombian Cuyahoga. If you're not American or if younger than 40 years old, you may be unfamiliar with the Cuyahoga River. It's a river in Ohio that is infamous for catching on fire in the 1960's...several times.
The US, the country where rivers burn, produces more trash than any other nation. But it usually does a damn fine job of hiding it all. It's no Switzerland, but the plastic bags on the side of the road are few and far between. Latin America produces less trash, but lets it all hang out. If there's a hand-painted "No Littering Here" sign on a wall, below it you'll find, without exception, 14 bags of trash, half of them torn open and dispersed by the roving dogs. Some kind of reverse psychology going on here... I'm thinking of painting the sign "Whatever you do, don't place your gold and diamonds here" on a wall and then waiting around the corner.
And if this were Nebraska or the Murmansk Oblast, nobody'd be complaining. But there's far too much beauty here between all the mountains and the beaches and the plains and the rainforest to let it be marred by styrofoam and plastic. I can only hope that, like the fires on the Cuyahoga River, Barranquilla's dump canal will spur the people's inner environmentalists into action.
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