Trash

     Corey went to Les Cayes today to copy materials for the goat classes that will begin on the 8th of December.  The kids and I spent the afternoon sitting on our front steps with our neighbors.  I pretended not to notice the group of children who were carefully picking through our trash.  Of course I knew this would happen as we had a similar experience in Fond des Blancs.  When I packed us for Haiti this time I was careful to remove all the packaging and trash I could to throw away before we came here- hoping not to be publicly shamed by our vast consumption of things.

     There is no public waste disposal system in Haiti.  Any trash you have is piled outside your home and eventually burned with coconut shells and leaves piled up around it.

     It was interesting to see what the kids wanted from our trash.  They saved the Doritos bags from my birthday, an old BIC lighter that no longer works, the lid of a wet wipes container, and kindly returned a Ziploc beef jerky bag to me.  Surely, they thought, we did not mean to throw that out as it still seals and can be used for sugar, flour, important paperwork, etc.  One of the neighbor girls, Judlyn, turned the shiny aluminum side of the Doritos bag into a dress for her doll.

     We are required to live transparently here and that is hard for me.  The people in Wozye know exactly what we consume, how many beers/ cokes we drink, how much water we use.  They take great interest in our activities.  But, of course, they all know these things about each other too.  They know who has new sandals, who gets to eat meat or fish at meal time, who is sick and who is struggling.  It's hard to be asked to live in total truth and transparency.  Yet that is what they ask of each other and what is necessary to live cooperatively, to live in community.