Trashy Thoughts...

When I wrote the following, we had just gotten back from our less-than twenty-four-hour trip to the landfill. This was so-far our most intense home-stay, although our briefest. As soon as we got there, even before leaving the song taew, the smell hit us. It smells exactly like what it is – an eighteen-meter pile of trash on about 40 acres – there’s no real metaphor for it. Walking around on our two-hour tour of the landfill, the smell only got more intense. We soon joined the scavengers, digging through trash for recyclable goods that they could trade in for money. However, our eyes weren’t as discerning as theirs, sharp with experience. It seemed for a while that every time I picked an item out of the pitchfork-shoveled pile and held up, asking “Dii?” [“Good?”], it was tossed aside with a smile and a reply of “mai dii” [not good].

It’s hard work, shoveling through trash, especially now in the rainy season when trash is saturated in rainwater as well as decomposing material. It got me thinking about what a hard job these people have. They work at this several hours a day under an unrelenting sun. Although they set their own hours, allowing them to work in the cooler nights or early mornings, they only make money when they work, and even then, a whole day’s work can only rope in no more than 200 Baht. (about equal to $20, although food is hecka cheap here, generally only 20-30 Baht a meal) This whole experience was a lesson in materialism. So many things were just thrown out, so many plastic bags, so many bottles. It really makes you want to do something better with your trash.

We found a lot of needles too. Later we heard this was because this landfill receives the local hospital’s trash, and for some reason they don’t often sort out the biohazard waste. Later, we found the incinerator where they separate the “infected trash.” There were buckets filled with used IV tubes (still with blood), and needles. I got a few photos, but we were warned not to get too close.



At one point we climbed up to the top of the highest pile of trash in the whole landfill. It was estimated to be 22 meters tall.
The villagers were expressing concerns for the environmental impact on their health. The village is across the narrow road from the landfill; smoke and light ash from the incinerator falls into their community. They told us about a time several years ago, when the municipality simply started dumping trash in the middle of the road, not ten meters from the closest houses, blocking the road. The children couldn’t get to school, and the monks couldn’t come in the mornings to collect the daily alms. Now the pump that is collecting the run-off water is broken, so the contaminated water is seeping into the neighboring rice fields. It causes them to be too fertile – the rice plants only produce flowers, no rice. The municipality paid-off the closest family several tens of thousands of Baht so they would keep quiet. It seems to have worked, because the only ones making any fuss about the water are the villagers who suspect their water and that of the city’s major reservoir may have been contaminated.



I feel like I’m learning so much from this whole experience. Last night at the exchange, we conversed with the villagers. They voiced their concerns about their community, yet we learned so much about their tenacity and organizing power. Their community, like that of the slums, is very tight-knit and able to come together to make decisions that affect the whole community. It’s something I wish would happen more in the States. All this organizing power I’ll have when I get back… watch out, America.

Speaking of which, several of us students have gotten interested in helping the community achieve their goals. CIEE is adamantly NOT a charity – which is fine with me – so we won’t fight their fight for them. However what we can do is work with the community, help them with our skills when theirs aren’t enough, and generally get the word out. A few friends are working to write a newspaper article about the incinerator, the water run-off problem, and why the municipality has reneged on all their promises to the community. Some friends and I are planning on involving Khon Kaen University’s Environmental Sciences and Agriculture faculties in doing research at the landfill, maybe facilitate a relationship between those two entities that will sustain itself long after our four months have passed by. That’s also what I’m kind of doing now – getting the word out, that is. All of you now know a bit about this situation here in this little, 40 acres of Thailand.

‘till later.