Trashcan Environmentalism

Living in a country other than one’s own, some cultural differences stand out more than others.

Lately, these differences have led to me to spend a lot of time thinking about trash. The streets of Lilongwe are fairly clean compared with Kinshasa or Nairobi - or even New York when I was growing up. But every time I’m on a field trip, driving though Malawi’s beautiful savanna countryside, someone in the vehicle rolls down the window to toss a piece of garbage out. Even my gardener leaves a pile of trash in the back corner of the garden despite the presence of a trash bin not 50 feet away.

I grew up in the coming of age of environmentalism in the US, when global warming still had to be proven and Tom Selleck did primetime specials on using fluorescent lightbulbs. My family had blue recycling bins for newspaper, cans and bottles. We insulated our windows in winter to conserve heat and re-used plastic containers. I cut up soda can ties so when the landfill got washed into the ocean, fish wouldn’t get caught in the plastic. I was green.

Now I live in a country where the principles of environmentalism follow different rules. There is no recycling center in a 500-miles radius but the useful life of any object far exceeds that which is expected in America. Shoes are repaired endlessly and anything that’s not already totally dilapidated is reused. In the case of dilapidation, the parts are consumed for integration into the reuse of other things.

And my carbon footprint? Even harder to say. While the average American’s food travels about 2500 miles from source to table, mine doesn’t come from much farther than a few hundred kilometers - but then I’m on enough long haul flights a year to get shunned by GreenPeace for all eternity.

So what now? I’m turning old wine bottles into glasses and vases. We have a lively vegetable garden. But when I go back to the US, I forget the milk carton doesn’t get lumped in with the rest of the trash. For the moment, I’m going to focus on stopping my teammates from rolling down the window of our gas-guzzling Land Cruiser and tossing their trash onto Malawi’s undeveloped grasslands.

Who you gonna call?

It’s more than vaguely reminiscent of the 1984 classic Ghostbusters. The protective gear, the spray cans, the coveralls. Bill Murray wasn’t around to see it but this week, Malawi set off to rid herself of some demons: the female anopheles mosquito, carrier of malaria.

In Nkhotakota, one of Malawi’s lakeshore districts, 26,000 households will be sprayed with a biodegradable insecticide that should keep mosquitoes out of people’s homes through the wet season due to start any day now. Furniture and personal belongings are cleared out so the indoor walls of the house can be sprayed with a time-release chemical based on pyrethrin (think citronella). Because the Anopheles mosquito bites predominantly at night and rests on walls after biting (we all need a little digestion time), spraying is a good way to keep mosquitoes at bay.

Malaria is still one of the biggest killers of children in the world - along with diarrhea and pneumonia, poor nutrition confounding it all - and Malawi is certainly no exception. With about 6 million cases annually, the disease detracts from work productivity and school attendance, not to mention the cost to families.

Stay tuned to find out how much spraying really does cut the transmission of malaria around here. It’s the kind of thing that might just change someone’s life.

Waiting

Having grown up in northeastern America, it’s something I may never get used to: in this corner of the earth, it only rains during part of the year. Summer and winter translate into wet and dry. When it’s dry, it’s bone dry, crackling, dusty, brittle dry. Green stands out like wealthy crook amid boundless poverty. The dust is the first thing you feel in the air when you awake in the morning. It lines the corners of your shelves, your windowsills, your life, a full-fledged invasion. Your skin, the earth, your lungs seek droplets of moisture and savor each tiny allowance.

I moved to Namibia in early June and didn’t see rain until November. I was on my way to Botswana when the rain began. I stopped the car, stood barefoot in the middle of the empty highway and tilted my face skyward.

In Botswana, the currency is comprised of pula, meaning rain, each composed of 100 thebes – raindrops.

I haven’t been here nearly as long but the last two weeks, the pressure has been building. It’s something inexplicable, the feeling that the rain is coming. Until yesterday there wasn’t a cloud in the crisp blue sky but we are animals and if we listen with the core of our being, we can feel the rain coming.

And there it was: as I walked out of the office yesterday, one sole raindrop tumbled from the sky onto my face.

This afternoon I awoke from a nap to a grey backdrop that had pushed out Lilongwe’s habitual blue in under an hour. Within minutes the facade cracked and the heavens came tumbling town.

When it rains for the first time, the sensation is intense. The smell comes before the sound of the beating of the earth, before the screen of pellets wavers before your eyes. It’s a rich smell with all that has been hiding in the earth rising to greet the long awaited water. It is dramatic transformation before your eyes.

The rain ebbs and flows, lightening and then strengthening again as thunder swoops though, but the smell stays strong, occupies the air with force, declaring its presence so surely that there can be no doubt that the rains have come.

Reflections on dessication

The air is dry here. So dry that the hairs in my nose stand at attention when I inhale. So dry that the skin on my cheeks feels taut a few minutes after putting on lotion. Still two months left before the rains. I remember Kinshasa, where my skin, my bathtowel, the air couldn’t absorb a drop more. Each breath was dense and weighty and thick with the constant perspiration of the jungle.

I met up with a group at a bar the other night. I chatted with a woman who’s ‘yaah’ slid as no one’s but a South African’s does. She’s been in Malawi most of her life. Her daughter’s going into secondary school this year. She doesn’t look much older than I am; I realise she’s probably not.

The roads here are narrow and unlit, the drivers slow and absent. There is no fury, no honking, no outrage, no rush. Side roads remain unnamed. The pace is consistent but not mindful. The colors are faded but the sky itself is sharpened by the sun, which turns fiery pink each evening as it slips through the dust to the horizon.

Keeping abreast of Congo

While I’ve been whiling my time away in the US, life is Congo chugges along through thick and thin. Bemba is still in exile in Portugal but promises to return to DRC in time for the next legislative session in mid-September.

In more positive news, six new animal species were discovered in eastern Congo on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. The expedition was carrier out earlier this year by the Wildlife Conservation Society (the Bronx Zoo), Chicago’s Field Museum, the National Centre of Research and Science in Lwiro and the World Wildlife Fund. The discoveries included a bat, a rodent, a shrew, and two frogs. Potentially new plant species collected are currently being classified.

Congo’s ongoing instability, particularly in the east, has created an incredible amount of human suffering and economically stunted the country in countless ways. Despite this, the war has also inadvertently protected vast swaths of rainforest that might otherwise have been logged, farmed and destroyed under a more stable government.

Here’s to looking at the brighter side of things.