World of Trash

The following day, on March 15, 2009, I had began the morning by accompanying my host family to church, where I noticed for the first time that the men and the women segregate themselves. The first time I went with them, I sat on the women’s side with my host mother (who was probably wondering what the hell is this boy doing following me). This time my host father made sure that I followed him to the appropriate side, and from there I could clearly see the women on one half and the men on the other. It struck me as odd that families wouldn’t want to sit together. I’m still not completely clear as to the reasoning behind this custom.

After church, all that was planned was for me to do my laundry that I had been putting off since I had arrived. It would be my first hand washing experience and would consist mainly of my host sisters laughing at me as I splashed some water around and moved my hands and fingers through the water in an unsuccessful attempt to recreate the agitation cycle that a washing machine uses. In the end, because of my cluelessness, my host sisters ended up doing all but my unmentionables for me. (Pays to play dumb…or to just actually in this case be dumb)

However, before returning to the house for the hand washing fiasco, Nicholas, my host father, needed to run a quick errand to get firewood and thought it would be a perfect time to show me the location in town. Basically, locations are where the whites, during apartheid, would force the black and colored (mixed) people to live. The colored location was closest to town, and the black location was furthest from the white town. Currently, locations are no longer segregated based on race or skin color, they are segregated based on social class, with the locations now being inhabited by the poor.

Since we had just come from church, we were all dressed in our nice semi-formal clothes, driving in the Kupembona’s nice, new, shiny white Toyota sedan. People were definitely staring, especially as we went deeper into the location. I thought I had seen poverty coming from my trip the past week to the Kavango region, but this was the ugliest thing I have seen so far. At least in the Kavango, people were still living in traditional houses, and while they may have appeared poor by western standards, they were still perfectly fine homes, made of natural materials. Here, the people lived in a city of trash. The streets were full of trash, little kids were digging through the trash, the children’s toys were made of trash or were pieces of trash, and the houses were pieced together by trash, by corrugated tin panels, plastic sheets, wood scraps, and whatever else people could find.

It was sad because this wasn’t how anyone should have to live. It’s one thing to live in nature, in the ways of your culture, because I don’t believe everyone should have to be forced into development. There are positives to living a natural and simple life. But to be stuck in between worlds, not attached to the past of your people, nor connected with the present of the developed world, just floating in the limbo between, in a place of poverty, a place of unworthiness, a place of suffering, living a diminished life.

This is the place where these people derive their identity from, they grasp at shreds of dignity with which to define themselves. It’s no wonder that much of the crime comes from this area, because if people are treated like trash, or believe themselves to be trash, then they start acting like it (even though they are far from it). They start trying to overcompensate for their feelings of inadequacy by taking from others, taking other people’s self-confidence, their sense of self-worth, their feeling of power, or their physical possessions. And sadly this happens all over the world.

Now, there are many individuals whose resilient spirits endure or resist the influence of their environments, and never allow the place they live, or the way they are treated to define or diminish who they are. They are amazing people who remain joyful, happy, and caring, and who remain fully human even in subhuman conditions. But still, in this day and age, in this world, with all that we as a species are capable of…no person should have to live in trash.

Until we change that, until we start giving all people throughout the world access to the adequate basics of life, the whole world will be living in the mess of trash that it created…in the rubbish of social problems that develop from poverty, the junk of selfish and thoughtless decisions that plague individualistic societies, the waste of suffering and pain of those affected directly or indirectly by subhuman environments, and worst of all, the garbage of human potential wasted, rotting away, unused and untapped for the betterment of the world. Because of how intricately interconnected the world is… while some of us continue to live in trash, we all end up living in trash. And I don’t know about you, but I am sick and tired of living in a world of trash. It’s high time we cleaned up…

(Sidenote: If you are interested in seeing some of the positive effects of treating the disadvantaged as if they are not so, then please look into the work of Bill Strickland. Mr. Strickland is building upscale schools for underprivileged people in various parts of the country, and the effect has been inspiring. Students are rising to the level at which they are treated, when more is given and expected out of them, they rise up to those expectations to fulfill their full potential.)