Dealing with the trash

The Gambia is a beautiful little country but among many other things it has a huge problem: trash.

I will perhaps start with a disclaimer stating that the aim of this post is not to be judgemental nor especially negative about the situation in The Gambia. The general idea is to shine a light in what is also one of the prevailing realities in the country even if it is of a negative kind. Visitors should be aware that this is also part of what they will find and that it is as much true as are all of the beautiful things which are there to be found and explored.

It is almost irrelevant where you are, dirt and trash seem to be omnipresent and quite frankly it seems to entirely be a non-issue for the locals who, fairly understandably, are too busy making a living to care.

As you walk by the urban centre in Banjul, you are likely to find plastic bags and half-burned leftovers of trash in any of the many open spaces which are often ruled over by goats and chicken. As if this was not enough, the city is filled with open-air sewers which become fetid and mosquito-infested in the summer. With no proper public waste disposal system and no trash containers anywhere to be seen even disposing of the most simple things, like a banana peel, will likely mean that you either carry it around with you in your bag until you get “home” or you simply discard it as the locals do. At times we felt like the crazy toubab carrying the trash around but we simply did not have the heart to add to the existing mess.

It is often not a pretty sight and ultimately it is something that you simply have to deal with.

And then there are the slums…

At Kachikally we had our first, ever I’d say, introduction into what a slum is. Much can be said about the place overall, but keeping in line with the current topic, the mind-boggling question is, in fact, how can people live in such squalor?

Open-air sewers which reminded us of what the middle ages may have been like, trash and half-built houses everywhere and children, so many children on the street. A harsh reality which apparently some members of the community are finally trying to change by themselves as government support seems to never come.

Elsewhere, one of the paths at the Bijillo monkey park runs very close to the beautiful shores and the beach. Filled with excitement I walked steadily to the edge of the park to see the views and then it hit me. The absolute stench of what I can only assume was something rotten in the distance. It is hard to explain the disappointment. I thought I was going to have an absolute movie-like moment of walking out of the bushes into a pristine ocean and perhaps even run into the waves... Instead, I walked off disgusted.

The Bijillo area in itself, aside from the Monkey Park, is actually a fairly well-do place where many of the embassies are established and where the fairly limited upper middle class is found. A sign of this was the fact that it did, in fact, have a garbage pick up once a week. That being said, this is how the garbage trucks are kept the rest of the time…

In fairness, we have to say that we were also positively shocked to see a garbage truck going through Kachikally right at the end of our trip and that did fill us with the hope that change may yet come.

The problem is not only urban though.

We were pretty convinced that the issues with the trash would be prevalent in the more urban areas and that somehow the rural areas would be quite pristine. We were wrong.

Walking by the small town of Kafuta we encountered disposable plastic in multiple places. Just laying there like small improvised dumps. It dumbfounded me at first but then again it simply adds up. In a place where most things are imported and running water, the foundation of life is only obtained through plastic cups and plastic bottles, the poorer places suffer just as much if not more. Think about it: the people have limited access to education, there is no waste disposal system beyond bonfires and most things come in packages. The result is fairly obvious...

As an example, we were having a walk by the riverside with Sama, a local who befriended us, and as we found a place where the river threw back the trash he simply told us that the river brought it. Entirely oblivious to the fact that the river only brings what it is given.

Remarkable for how picturesque it is but also for how ill-kept things are is the fishing village of Tanji.

Tanji with all of its traditional fishing boats both from The Gambia and Senegal is often presented as one of the postcards of the country but when you get there you are once more faced with waste and dirt.

As you cross through the town and market towards the beach things are pretty much according to the country’s standards but as you hit the beach you enter a bit of a different reality. It is not so much the plastic and general trash that shock you, though for sure you will find that around, it is more the number of fish carcasses which are left for the birds to pick on.

Being a fishing village, Tanji lives off of the fish that the fishermen bring in and understandably some of that is discarded or simply lost during the transport. That being said, leftover fish laying on the sand or floating on the shore seems to be entirely irrelevant to all of the people at the beach who simply go on with their trade, take naps on the shades of their boats and occasionally gather for a football match.

I cannot claim to have an easy solution for the waste treatment issues of this country nor can I fully blame the people for the current situation but I do wish that the community would rise up (as they have begun in Kachikally) and together fight against the plague of trash.

Until then life goes on obliviously.