Garbage

There’s no such thing as garbage collection for communities such as ours. So it all just gets thrown into the canal. This is one of the garbage bottlenecks of a neighbouring community.


Now of course I don’t blame my neighbours for dumping their garbage into the canals. After all, industries dump their waste there. Why should the poor do anything different?

And while the damage to the environment caused by dumping garbage like this is in some ways pretty obvious, out in the open and staring right back at you, I also realise that as a westerner living in a society insatiably hungry for consumer products and energy, my environmental footprint has undoubtedly been far higher than theirs. Surely I must deal first with the plank in my own eye.

Nevertheless, although this is the community system, I really don’t want to add our own trash to it. Luckily, within a 10 minute bike ride (cycle that is), is the local dump, which I usually pass at least once per week.

I do not rate riding past the dump one of the highlights of my week. To breathe through the nose is to invite a pungent stench. To breathe through the mouth is to invite an insect snack much in the manner I imagine a whale feeds on plankton.

You should have seen the looks on the dump workers’ faces when I first rode up to hand deliver my back pack full of garbage! I’ve been told we’re the only foreigners in this whole region of the city, and to see me doing that was probably the most baffling thing to have happened around there in a long time.

But hopefully as well as delivering our garbage I can also start to get to know some of the people working here. They're doing some of the worst work I can imagine (young kids included). I.e. wading through the trash amongst the pigs, cows, dogs and crows looking for anything recyclable to salvage. It really breaks my heart to see the children there.

So, let’s together find ways to go against the grain of the societies we’re in to care both for our neighbours and the environment. I’m sure the ‘groaning creation’ (Romans 8) will appreciate it! And we might even see some small but beautiful, mustard seed like ways in which the harmony that God made for us to have with each other and all creation will one day be made new.

Prayer for peace

Lord, make me a channel of your peace,
that where there is hatred,
I may bring love;

where there is wrong,
I may bring the spirit of forgiveness;

where there is discord,
I may bring harmony;

where there is error,
I may bring truth;

where there is doubt,
I may bring faith;

where there is despair,
I may bring hope;

where there are shadows,
I may bring light;

where there is sadness,
I may bring joy.

Lord, grant that I may seek rather to comfort than to be comforted;

to understand than to be understood;

to love than to be loved;

for it is by forgetting self that one finds, it is by forgiving that one is forgiven, it is by dying that one awakens to eternal life.

Amen.


- Commonly attributed to Francis of Assisi (prayed daily by Mother Teresa)