Two Stops Past Siberia

So, when I got to site, my NGO was working hard and fast on a project funded by the OSCE simply called “We’re for a Clean City!” and started by, among other people, an old professor of mine from Bucknell. Well, the idea was pretty simple.

We got a troupe of young volunteers together and canvassed the city, asking people if they thought trash was a problem in the city, and if they’d be interested in signing on to a voluntary trash program that included a binding tax. This tax would go to pay for dumpsters in their neighborhoods as well as general use cans on the town’s main thoroughfare and other public places. We then asked them what they thought of the program and put all this information in a gigantic database, which was all turned over to the local government. Furthermore, my understanding was the people who didn’t sign on to the program would be “convinced” to do so at some point in the future, to help combat free riders.

As part of the initial grant and with the income from the tax, the city bought two garbage trucks, and the new neighborhood dumpsters and community cans, as well as installed them. Along with the physical infrastructure improvements, the program also called for an education campaign. For this campaign, we organized trash seminars at each of the 7 local primary/secondary schools. We asked the teachers to round up around 30 excited, passionate treehuggers, and then we spent a day teaching them the nuts and bolts of solid waste. While my counterpart talked about technical things that I didn’t understand, I talked about the Three R’s: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. I designed a nice flow chart, with Kyrgyz labels, showing how the relative importance of each R corresponded to the order in which I presented them, namely Reducing totally obliterates Reusing which in turn deals a knock-out blow to Recycling. It was fun, and they seemed to get it.

I liked the program, as had I noticed trash and littering, and a totally unnecessary use of plastic bags to be a big problem. I even thought about a cheap improvement to the cans where we painted traditional Kyrgyz symbols on them, like those found on their rugs, as well as the program’s slogan, to hopefully encourage the community to embrace the idea. Well, while we got the cans and trucks, I never got any painting done. I don’t know what has gone on with payment, but from my impression, the trash from the bins is being collected in a timely manner.

As for the public cans, however, thats another story. These suckers, once proudly lining the main drag, dotting the corners of every other block, today are in a bad way. Today some still hold strong, but they’re the exception to the rule. It began when people starting stealing the bolts that allowed the cans to swing, so we the city workers could empty them. Then I noticed some cans overflowing with trash. Next, those curved lids started to disappear. After that, the cans started to show up in all manner of disarray, from wanton destruction to complete disappearance.

So, some successes, some failures, or as the saying goes, no good deed goes unpunished.

Now the basic assessment that I have done here is, hopefully, just the beginning. As with any good project, if there is no follow-up, you’re just throwing money into the wind. We need to figure out if trash is really being collected in a timely manner. We need to figure out why on Earth the people of Naryn, a community who identified the lack of public trash cans as a problem, a community who once chided us on not putting in enough cans, has watched them get destroyed. We need to see if the students we taught about solid waste incorporated any of that knowledge into their daily lives. Its an uphill struggle, cultural change.

But don’t worry folks, we’re on a mission, and we’ll keep at it.