The Gambia could be a beautiful country. The sienna sand, tall beige reeds, grasses rustling. I love driving through the country, there are areas that look like English parkland dotted with huge majestic trees, lush mango and cashew groves where mid green leaves give the occasional flash of burnt umber, amber and scarlet, waterlogged fields hemmed by tall palm trees giving a high five to the sky. It is, famously, a paradise for birds. Green and yellow bee-eaters dart over water, yellow and ochre weavers create their fruit like nests in hanging branches, tiny dusty aubergine and blue speckled doves waddle across fields. But it is so messy.
It is over a year since I arrived in Gambia. When I left the plane there was a smell. It is the smell of rotting rubbish decomposing in the sun, though I only learned that later. Yesterday as I walked home I noticed that the dumped rubbish stretches the whole way around the path. Most of it doesn’t look new. Walking past the bigger piles, with vultures and goats picking through them, you have to hold your breath. It is disgusting.
There’s a lovely lane through the garden outside my house. It would be the most idyllic walk to work but at the corner you have to tread carefully through reams of bags and trash. Why? When I arrived I tried to work out where to take my rubbish. It turns out there is a skip 20 minutes’ walk away that is sometimes cleared. My landlord didn’t want to throw my bag in with his when he drove down there so, as a pedestrian, I looked for another way. Eventually I paid a man D25 (about 50p) a week to add my one bag of rubbish to his load. I hope and assume it is actually thrown in the right place.
There are many reasons there is so much litter here. The baskets and shopping bags that used to accompany every market trip are now discarded in favour of black plastic. There are the very cheap black plastic bags everything comes wrapped in, giving privacy to shoppers in compounds where everyone is expected to share but usually only lasting one trip. Some things, like plastic bottles, are heavily reused, but when the water comes in sachets, the empty plastic is thrown on the floor. This comes from the practice at home where it will be swept up later but there is no one to do that in the street. There are no real accessible public bins, no public waste collection and, even after a national Set Settal (Operation Clean Up) where the country stops every last Saturday morning of the month to clean, the resulting waste lies uncollected until it simply returns to being debris in the street until next time. There’s a lot of “stick” and not a lot of “carrot”. My little walk to work is an ideal spot for dropping rubbish unseen by any one collecting fines for those “illegally dumping”. People keep their houses clean but the country outside suffers as the infrastructure to keep it clean and tidy is lacking. Until that comes, alongside a change in the pride people have in their country, The Gambia will be like a beautiful country, but with a bag over its head.
Helen Updates 