Garbage women

It’s around 1pm and the rubbish ladies have just come to collect. Every week, 2 women arrive with their donkey and cart, knock politely on our front gate and then come into our yard with their worn straw mat. They speak no French, and I only a little Moré, so our conversations are short. But gestures transcend spoken language, and I know that on a hot humid day (pretty much every day in Ouaga) they’re asking for water. I bring out a large bottle of chilled water from our fridge, and they drink cup after cup until it’s almost all gone. They smile at me, and laugh kindly when I respond to them in Moré.

One lady appears much older than the other and some of her front teeth are missing. She wears a crucifix around her neck, and both are dressed in worn, dirty clothes. The smell from their open rubbish cart follows them as they take the path beside our house and empty the half-gallon drum that serves as our ‘wheely bin’.

The rubbish goes onto the straw mat, which they lug back down our path, one lady holding either end. The rubbish is dumped onto the pile in their cart, buzzing with flies, while the donkey waits patiently. I wave the ladies goodbye, say ‘barka’ (thank you) and lock the gate after them, wrinkling my nose at the horrible smell. And then I come inside where the air is nicer.

We’ve seen where some of the rubbish gets taken – an open air dump that we have to ride through to get to one of our English classes. At this dump, the ladies arrive and unload their donkey carts then sort through the rubbish to remove what can be re-used (empty cans, plastic bottles etc). We don’t know what happens to the unusable rubbish – it may get buried there on the site, which is right next to the canal where little kids play. I hate riding through this place, because of the smell. But I ride past and then it’s gone. The other people work there, while their kids play amongst the discarded plastic ware, plastic bags and other junk.

We pay the equivalent of $2.50 a month for this once-a-week rubbish collection service. A fairly well-dressed lady comes around at the end of the month, on her bicycle with her baby tied to her back, and collects the money. She is the ‘middle-man’. She collects for a man who runs the business. So we can only speculate how much of that $2.50 goes to the garbage ladies who do the dirty work, who have the stench of rubbish on them all day, and who walk around in the heat urging their donkey to keep going.

Cathlin