Garbage AKA Basura

Over the past years, I’ve spent many, many hours walking simply everywhere in La Ceiba and with my curious greedy eyes I see a lot of the small details of daily life.

Garbage is a huge problem here in the city and on the beaches. The Hotel Majestic in Colonia La Alhambra has two 45 gallon barrels out front for their garbage and by collection day, you can’t see the barrels for everything that is either bagged up or spread loose around them.

Sadly it’s common to see a commercially sponsored half barrel labelled “Basura” that is empty while the ground six feet around it is completely obliterated with plastic and paper trash. You find it stacked in and on top the raised bins for collection, strewn on the ground, blowing down the roadways, dumped in alleys and ditches, stacked at the edges of the railway tracks, piled on the boulevards, simply and literally everywhere.

Canada has a reputation in Honduras for being a clean country that people regard with appreciation and I try to explain that children are taught from an early age that garbage is to be contained and that littering, the act of dropping small bits on the ground, is actually against the law. Frequently, this is met with that polite but quizzical look of mild disbelief and the conversational topic is changed. There is absolutely no educational process whereby the majority of people are taught to keep garbage contained for health and ascetic reasons.

By the same token, many people who are working, middle class and higher social strata work diligently, daily, to keep their homes, courtyards and boulevards as clean as any you could hope to find anywhere.

In the downtown areas, I have frequently seen the small armies that of solitary women with their push brooms and long handled whisk pans who sweep the curb sides of the main streets. Some even have their two wheeled garbage bins with bags and brooms tucked along side that they trundle along on their specific circuits.

I am not certain, but I believe these women receive a very small pittance from the municipality with the hope of monetary assistance from the business owners that their cleaning areas cover. Needless to say, these are the extreme of the lowest working class earners.

There is also a municipality organized schedule of garbage pickup in the various areas of La Ceiba. I have learned that my barrio, Colonia La Alhambra has their pickup day on the Tuesday of the week and have watched the process.

It’s an open back 5 ton truck, wooden sided with no back gate with a driver, two or three “runners” and two more workers right in the back of the truck. The truck drives along slowly while the runners grab huge bales, bags and oversized plastic barrels of trash and force or throw them up into the back of the truck. The workers in the truck then try to force it forward and on top of what is already there. None of these workers have safety boots, work or rubber gloves, masks or sometimes even long pants. No rakes to bundle up whatever has come loose, so it stays behind on the ground.

This past year I’ve noticed that there is now a market for scrap metal and some form of recycling for plastic bottles and aluminium cans which now means that there are more people digging through the trash that is put out, looking for said items. It also means that the actual garbage collectors are opening bags and going through them (bare handed!) to separate out those items that could be sold for cash.

Yes, it’s an incremental step towards an effort to recycle and curb garbage but sadly at this early stage of the game, it only makes the problem worse with even more loose garbage spread about willy nilly.