Lets Talk Trash

I feel like I’ve been starting out all my post and conversations back home with “It’s been a long time since I last wrote anything”. And this post is no different. It has been a while since I posted anything here.

I have been back in town working with another PCV on this trash collection project we got going on. I’m going to say this whole thing started way back in November last year when I was doing something called ‘In-Service Training’. It’s where after you’ve been at post for 3 months you go meet up in another town with all the other PCVs for a week of more training. Well, during this week we spent some time visiting a high school, and it is there that I saw a crappy make shift trash can. I looked inside and saw it was actually being used, then I looked around and saw the ground was almost free of trash. Anyone who knows Togo knows it is a dirty place where the idea of taking out the trash means sweeping all the crap you’ve thrown on the ground inside your compound and dumping it in a pile outside your house(preferably next to your house or next to the road where people walk by). Once the pile gets big enough you then light it on fire. The smell of burning plastic is just a normal part of life here in my little town of Sotouboua. And I’ve just been talking about trash from the house. If you’re walking through town all you do is throw your thrash down right where you are. The streets are lined with plastic bags and wrappers. So getting back to the trash can at the high school; it just seemed so out of place. But it looked like it was working, so I took a picture of it.

A couple weeks later I was back in Sotouboua and talking to the head of the office of hygiene (my buddy Attisso) over at the hospital. I showed him the picture and said how cool it would be to make a few of these things and put them in some of the public places around town. I told him it would be great if the new market(currently being constructed) could have some trash cans put in it. That’s when he got super excited and was on board for this! A little while later I was talking to my awesome site mate(another PCV who lives here in Sotouboua) about it. She said she had also been thinking for a while about a trash collection project, and about how years ago there use to be some kind of program set up here. So that’s when we decided to join forces and, with our powers combined, clean up Sotouboua.

After some more talks with Attisso we all decided to go to the mayor’s office to present them the idea and see if they would help out. It just so happened that within the past month an NGO from Lomé had sent a letter to the mayor’s office. This NGO ran a successful trash collection program in Lomé and were looking to expand and do the same thing in different towns and had picked Sotouboua. I don’t know if we could have asked for better timing! So our idea grew into a project with two aspects. One would be constructing and placing trash cans in the new Sotouboua market, and the second would be creating a system to collection trash from household to household.

After a lot of figuring stuff out, my site mate and I got onto writing a proposal to get funded by SPA(which is from USAID). We spent a lot of time justifying the project and writing down how and why it would be successful and be a huge benefit to the community. We sent it in with high hopes of getting reviewed and accepted. Unfortunately it got rejected.

The reasoning from the committee was a few things. First, what was eventually going to happen to all the trash? Was it going to get burned, buried, composted, what exactly? The second was that there once was a trash collection program in Sotouboua, but it failed. Who’s to say this one wouldn’t either so why waste money on it.

So we went back and did a lot of planning meetings with our Togolese counterparts, and looked a lot into the past program. The trash was going to be collected and eventually separated into what could be composted and what couldn’t be. Then from what couldn’t be, all the plastic bagss would be taken out, because there is an association down in Lomé that collects those things. The remaining things would put into what we are calling intermediate trash sites. There are a few of these sites throughout Sotouboua that are away from housing and from where people are. Once an intermediate trash site is filled up it will be emptied out and the trash taken to a landfill outside of the town.

The other problem was about the old program failing. We talked to many people who were involved with it. It actually turned out to be an old Peace Corps project. It went very well when the volunteer was there, but after they left it fell apart after a year because of corruption. Each neighborhood was in charge of organizing their collection, and there was a person in charge of going around and collecting money from the residents to get their trash collected. Apparently it fell apart because whoever was in charge stole money out of the collection fund, this lead to the trash collectors not getting paid, so they didn’t work as much, this lead to residents not willing to pay because they weren’t getting trash collected, and things fell apart. Good job corruption!

So we had to think hard about how not to have this turn into an opportunity for someone to make some quick cash and screw over a bunch of people (this is what typically happens when international funding comes into Togo).

Luckily we had the backing of the NGO from Lomé and the mayor office (which had all new people in it from the time of the old program). After a lot of planning we decided to only start out in a few neighborhoods in the middle of town. This way we can set up a smaller more controlled program. Once it has been successfully running in those neighborhoods, we can start expanding it out into others. The mayor’s office will be in charge of logistical stuff, from registering residents in the community, to holding and maintaining all the materials and supplies for trash collection. The NGO is in charge of the management of the funds to the management of the trash collectors. With them we recently did interviews for trash collectors and supervisors(the person who collects the fee from residents to get their stuff collected). My buddy Attisso, me, and my site mate are the promoters of the project and are helping get the message out to the community about why it is important to not live in a dirty town and why you should pay a little fee to have this place cleaned up. I feel like my real job here is to make sure meetings happen, that everyone understands why this is important and that people are motivated to do work.

So we had more stuff figured out and justified, and sent in our newly planned out and typed up proposal. This time it got approved!